Big Pharm makes for a familiar villain in Lawson's solidly plotted but not especially lively seventh installment (House...
A Washington, D.C., lobbyist is murdered and his partner is framed for the crime. Back for another adventure in congressional fixing, investigator Joe DeMarco untangles a plot involving the deaths of human guinea pigs being used to test a miracle drug.
Orson Mulray, new CEO of Mulray Pharma, is counting on a new drug that can eliminate Alzheimer's disease—and, even more importantly, make his company bigger and more powerful than it was under his unloving and underachieving father. True-believing philanthropist Lizzie Warwick has put her organization at Mulray's beck and call in Peru, not knowing the testing of subjects has led to four deaths—and that the deaths are treated as necessary to the experiments. Her lobbyist discovers the truth but is murdered before he can share it with her. DeMarco, deposed Speaker of the House John Mahoney's go-to guy, is soon pursued by professional killers who learned their tactics in Delta Force. DeMarco's friend Emma, a former intelligence agent dying of cancer, is swept into the plot as well. Her calmly pragmatic response to a violent threat is one of the highlights of the book, leaving us wishing she were in it more. DeMarco is a likable enough character with a good sense of humor, but can't be said to have much in the way of star power. Lawson, a former senior civilian executive for the Navy, is likewise a competent storyteller, but the writing lacks color, and the action never rises above the functional.
Big Pharm makes for a familiar villain in Lawson's solidly plotted but not especially lively seventh installment (House Divided, 2011, etc.) in the Joe DeMarco series.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1994-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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