by Mickey Spillane ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2003
If Hammer’s last case, Black Alley (1996), was an exercise in shamus nostalgia, this yarn regresses even further to the...
What a difference a half-century makes. The legendary hard-boiled master’s latest seafaring adventure, less Mike Hammer than Ernest Hemingway, packs all the wallop of a newborn kitten.
Mako Hooker calls himself a fisherman, and has a nifty boat, the Clamdip, and a Caribe captain, Billy Bright, to prove it. But the hush-hush government agency he retired from after a lethally successful career calls him an invaluable local resource when a series of vessels in the Bermuda Triangle fall prey to attacks by unknown causes. Could the boats be running into unexploded American bombs laid years ago? Or are the gouges in their hulls evidence of something with . . . teeth? When the Company sends down a crew under Mako’s ex-colleague Chana Sterling to coordinate with Mako, there’s a brief flare-up of Hammer’s unregenerate voice (“for a second he wished he had been packing his .45 . . . so he could turn and shoot her guts right out of her beautiful body and it would finally be over with for all time”) that’s so anachronistic it’s like seeing a prehistoric fish break the surface. Soon thereafter, though, the tale gets becalmed in criminal conspiracies that go nowhere (courtesy of smooth Hollywood producer Anthony Pell, formerly mobster Tony Pallatzo), a romance with Hollywood heiress Judy Durant that goes nowhere surprising, and a series of portentous hints about the mako shark that’s following the Clamdip into dangerous waters because it sees itself, not unnaturally, as Mako’s twin. It all ends with an unforgivably muffled finale that will leave an awful lot of readers wondering just what was down there.
If Hammer’s last case, Black Alley (1996), was an exercise in shamus nostalgia, this yarn regresses even further to the Boy’s Own Adventure period, complete with the girl in the pink bikini the hero wouldn’t dream of seducing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5146-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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