Salvalaggio’s fourth installment (Walleye Junction, 2016, etc.) lives up to her talent for dropping unhappy souls into grim...
There are more tricks than treats when a quiet college town bursts into violence on Halloween.
Grace Adams changed her surname to Larson before enrolling as an art major at a liberal arts college in Bolton. On Halloween she chooses another identity, Carrie, from Stephen King’s eponymous horror novel, at a costume contest in a local bar. On a long, drunken walk home, she falls asleep on a stranger’s lawn and awakens to the smell of a burning house—the nearby mansion belonging to bestselling author Peter Granger and his wife, Hannah. Grace had once been almost a member of the family, until Peter kicked her out of his writing workshop and Hannah stopped giving her painting lessons. Now she’s a person of interest in the matter of the ruined mansion and the two burned bodies found in the conjugal bed. When Detective Macy Greeley, a special investigator for the Montana Department of Justice, is called in to supervise the case, not only does she know Bolton well from her college days, but she also has a history with Grace and knows better than almost anyone why Grace was so resentful of Peter for basing a crime novel on her traumatic past (Bone Dust White, 2014). As Macy interviews the Grangers’ devoted personal assistant, as well as Hannah’s lover, the evidence—revelations about Peter’s manipulative relationships with the young female students in his workshop, a set of compromising photographs—indicates that the burned house was definitely arson and one of the corpses is Peter. Also missing is Grace’s threatening letter to Peter, his laptop, the draft of his crime novel, and paintings worth millions. But the biggest question is not who killed Peter before setting his house on fire but who’s the woman whose burned body was found next to his?
Salvalaggio’s fourth installment (Walleye Junction, 2016, etc.) lives up to her talent for dropping unhappy souls into grim circumstances and handing them over to her flawed but capable protagonist to save or arrest.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07893-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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