A tightly executed thriller and the high point of a great series.
In this third installment of his Travelers series, King’s (The Computer Heist, 2016, etc.) con-artist couple target a would-be politician.
The Traveling Man and his wife are in a town called Randal Junction. This time, he’s taken the name “George Harrison,” while she goes by “Roslyn.” They’re posing as married real estate agents to penetrate the ambitious life of banker Donald Honeycutt, who’s running for Congress. The con begins in earnest when Roslyn draws Honeycutt into a sexual affair, and George clandestinely films one of their trysts from a van. They later mail the banker a package containing a few steamy stills and a DVD of the event, which he nearly opens in front of his even-more-ambitious wife, Billie Honeycutt. They also send him a note demanding that he drop $10,000 into a mailbox each month, or they’ll tell Billie and the media everything. The con proceeds apace until Billie notices a missing $10,000 that no campaign business accounts for. Although she’s aware of her husband’s one weakness—women—she’d made him promise not to philander during the campaign. She sets a private eye named Stan Jessup on the banker’s trail to learn more. Roslyn, however, has a secret that radically alters the nature of the blackmail scheme—one that could make Randall Junction the Travelers’ last stop. For his third small-town thriller, King nearly undoes his ruthless couple by pitting them against an equally horrible duo. Billie, for example, is only with Donald because she “plans to go to Washington and take her wheeling and dealing to the next level without having to be in office herself.” As usual, King’s dialogue and secondary characters make for rich, pulpy reading; for example, when Sheriff Bo Teardale catches up with George, he reassures him by saying, “You’ve been watching too much TV. If I want you disappeared, you’ll disappear.” And even though King gives Donald the self-deprecating line, “It was the plot to a bad movie,” he masterfully crafts the deadly tangle of interpersonal alliances and their fallout. Although this volume could finish the Travelers’ tales, a sequel would be irresistible.
A tightly executed thriller and the high point of a great series.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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