After two in England, French brings her third to the US—an elegant, chilling take on love, murder, and obsession. Alice Loudon is young, brainy, and beautiful. She has a comfortable London apartment, a satisfactory lover, and an enviable job on the science side of industry. The direction of her life seems already settled, then, but it isn’t. Crossing a street on her way to work one morning, she locks eyes with a tall, unbelievably handsome, stranger—and suddenly she’s lost. When she leaves her building later that day, he’s waiting for her. When he asks her to go with him, she does. He’s Adam Tallis, a celebrated mountaineer, a hero, having recently saved several lives during a notorious and doomed climbing expedition. The two make love explosively. Not just good sex, or great sex, Alice thinks, but “obliterating sex.” She also thinks she might be going mad. Whatever the reality, she can’t stop what’s happening to her. Gone in an eye-blink are the comfortable apartment and the satisfactory lover. Two months from the time of their first meeting, Alice and Adam are married, but almost at once Alice feels uneasy, afraid. Who is this man she’s entangled with? Is the violence she senses in him controllable? What about those women in his past, those women now no longer alive? Three accidental deaths? At what point does coincidence become something else—like menacing? Reluctantly, Alice turns detective. The truth is her survival tool, and she needs it as much as Adam needs her not to find it. Still passionately in love, they eye each other warily, they maneuver around each other, and when finally they clash, it’s shattering. Tight plotting, impeccable prose, fleshed-out characters: writer to welcome and watch.(Film rights to Montecito Picture Co.; Literary Guild featured alternate, Doubleday Book Club, Mystery Guild) . . . Furutani, Dale JADE PALACE VENDETTA Morrow (256 pp.) $23.00 Jul. 1999 ISBN: 0-688-15818-8 Jade Palace Vendetta ($23.00; Jul.; 256 pp.; 0-688-15818-8): The second installment in Furutani’s samurai trilogy (Death at the Crossroads, 1998) finds freelance warrior Matsuyama Kaze interrupting his search for his dead lord’s son to save merchant Hishigawa Satoyasu from murderous bandits—and then getting plenty of chances to regret the act of courage that’s landed him in a stew of deception and treachery.
Pub Date: July 7, 1999
ISBN: 0-89296-697-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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