Readers will eagerly follow the reckless, entertaining protagonist as he navigates LA and Vegas in this sinuous mystery.
In the author’s debut thriller, a man’s Los Angeles vacation takes unexpected turns when he realizes that the cousin he’s come to visit has gone missing.
Jake Wood’s LA excursion from Iowa to see his cousin Jana begins smashingly when he meets Jana’s parts-model (mostly hands) friend, Laurie. But when attempts to contact Jana result in a few vague text messages, Jake and Laurie go looking for her, suspecting something’s wrong when Jana’s employer, scientist Dr. Gregory Mirek, doesn’t seem to have an office in Los Angeles. Soon the couple is submerged in deception, blackmail and very possibly murder. Kolinski’s novel has a strange but fascinating structure: A romantic relationship between two lead characters starts before the mystery begins. This fits the storyline—the two initially believe that Jana is too busy with her job to respond to emails or texts—but it also makes sense when Jake and Laurie eventually travel together, even hopping a plane to Las Vegas. Jake is a complex protagonist, all too happy to escape Iowa, where he was the sole survivor of a workplace killing spree and suspected by an overzealous detective. And he can deliver understated one-liners: In one of the story’s best scenes, he and Laurie troll a college campus for Dr. Mirek’s research team, and seeing a group photo, Jake drolly asks, “Which one of these guys looks disgruntled to you?” The plot includes accusations of animal abuse—the doc’s field is primatology—and unflinching descriptions may scare off some animal lovers, but Kolinski doesn’t dwell on the imagery or exploit it for shock value. It’s simply another murky element of the couple’s descent into a seedy world, in the same way that Vegas is cast in a less-than-glamorous light with smoke-laden, tattered casinos. The mystery hints at future events, including an early indication of Jana’s whereabouts, and doesn’t deliver easy answers; most of the plot unfolds via Jake’s and Laurie’s theories, which are on the mark only some of the time.
Readers will eagerly follow the reckless, entertaining protagonist as he navigates LA and Vegas in this sinuous mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478390084
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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