A bestselling track record and some hot sex scenarios can't mask the fact that Rosenberg's latest legal-action thriller is a clunker. When her highway patrolman husband, Hank, disappeared, probation officer Ann Carlisle came apart at the seams. Now, four years later, her 12-year-old son, David, has nightmares, wets his bed, and is eating himself into a fat slug. But Ann is beginning to get her life back. She's dating rugged, ostentatiously wealthy assistant DA Glen Hopkins, whose mama is a powerhouse judge, and though David hates him, the sex is great; they even do it in the stairwell of the courthouse. Then Ann is shot outside the courthouse, and again her world turns upside down. Ann's probationer Jimmy Sawyer, a drug dealer who saved her life, is charged with the crime and immediately smears Ann, saying they had an affair that went sour. Ann is getting harassing phone calls from a man who sounds like Hank, and she is forced to remember that her marriage was less than idyllic. Hank liked to smack her around—but did he shoot her? Ann fears she'll antagonize Glen because she's uncovered evidence that may free a rapist he's locked up, and Tommy Reed, a macho Keystone-like cop, smothers her with concern. Like assistant DA Lily Forrester of Mitigating Circumstances (1993), who kills the man she thinks raped her and her daughter, Ann is a victim who tries to go on the offensive. But her actions are obscured by her girlish, namby-pamby ways and her deference to the men she loves. Rosenberg is a former probation officer whose obnoxious promo material tells us she was raped in college and therefore knows how victims feel. She offers a glimpse into a probation officer's gritty day-to-day activities, but it's not very interesting. Cartoon characters, psychobabble, and a helpless heroine who's oblivious to the culprit right under her nose. Skip the book and wait to rent the movie on a very slow weekend. (Literary Guild main selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 1994
ISBN: 0-525-93853-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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