Joseph (Boy, 9, Missing, 2016) employs a lot of twists to get to her denouement, watering down some of its impact, and while...
Lots of blood but no body kicks off a thriller in which nothing is what it seems.
Detective Steven Paul is barely holding onto his job when he and his partner, Gayla Ocasio, are sent to visit Emily Lindsey in the hospital. He’s been having terrible dreams, and they’re affecting his waking life, so much so that his partner has been asked to report back to the department therapist if she thinks he’s having problems. When they meet Emily, she’s awake but unresponsive, and then when they come back into the room after having stepped outside for a few minutes, she’s drawn a symbol all over herself and her bed—a symbol that Steve has been seeing in his dreams. How is that possible? Emily’s husband, Dan, discovered her at their home covered in blood and clutching a knife but unable to tell him what happened; she’s not injured, so it isn't her own blood, and Steve’s name was on a Post-It Note in her pocket. Turns out Emily is a popular blogger known for stirring the pot, and her research into Ryan Griggs, a controversial figure in big pharma, has ruffled some powerful feathers. That's all Steve and Gayla have to work with. It’s an eye-opening avenue of investigation, and they need all the help they can get, because all that blood belongs to someone, and hopefully it’s not too late for him or her. Meanwhile, Steve, who narrates, struggles to cope with not only the nightmares and the visions, but the pain of not seeing the little boy who's not biologically his child but whom he raised from a very young age with his ex-wife. Interspersed with Steve and Gayla’s investigation are passages involving a group of children living in a compound who are determined to find out what terrible thing happens every year on June 2—it may have a connection with Steve’s terrible nightmares.
Joseph (Boy, 9, Missing, 2016) employs a lot of twists to get to her denouement, watering down some of its impact, and while the story requires some suspension of disbelief, Joseph’s prose is smooth enough to keep the pages turning.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4653-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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