A stumble: even her dependably crisp prose turns slipshod as, after three notably successful ventures (Land of the Living,...
Another beautiful heroine beset by another Iago in French’s underimagined latest.
But they do meet cute—at a skating rink where both do a lot of amiable falling down. She likes him (“His hair is glossy black like a raven’s wing”), and yet when he asks for her phone number, Miranda Cotton experiences “a moment of reluctance.” Readers who know their way around this author’s oeuvre will experience a moment of foreshadowing and will mark Brendan Block as a black-hearted sicko. Briefly, the two become lovers, though the affair ends when Miranda comes home from work to find Brandon making free with her London flat—and, more importantly, with her very private diary. She bounces him, but Brendan, of course, doesn’t take kindly to rejection and sets about implementing a pattern of vengeful behavior. In short order, he bewitches Miranda’s sister, dazzles her parents, and has a devastating effect on her young brother’s delicate psyche. Desperate, Miranda seeks help, but so seductively charming is Brendan that no one will believe him capable of the villainy she describes—not her family, not the lover who succeeds Brendan, not her best friend (who pays a bitter price for skepticism), and not the feckless police (“I’m not very interested in patterns,” says one cloddish cop). Relentlessly, Brendan battens on Miranda’s misery, piling up a pitiless string of victories in the cat-and-mouse game he refuses to end, until, at last—as you knew she must—Miranda finds the right fellow sufferer, a woman as angry as she is, to join her in an alliance that can cut the cat down to size.
A stumble: even her dependably crisp prose turns slipshod as, after three notably successful ventures (Land of the Living, 2003, etc.), French’s elegant creepiness goes formulaic.Pub Date: June 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53347-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
A proficient but routine thriller in which you can tell for miles in advance who’s disposable and who’s slated for survival,...
The past comes knocking for a former stripper who thought she’d said goodbye to all that in an altogether less-successful distaff reworking of The Innocent (2005).
In some ways, the life Megan Pierce left behind when she stopped giving lap dances and calling herself Cassie was perfect: exciting, glamorous and anything but routine. If only her abusive client Stewart Green hadn’t vanished under circumstances that strongly suggested a violent end, Megan would never have taken a powder, ultimately trading Atlantic City’s La Crème nightclub for the American dream with a lawyer husband, two perfect children and every appliance of the upscale suburban lifestyle. One day, however, Megan—motivated solely, it seems, by the need to kick-start the plot—decides to drop in at La Crème. Her sudden reappearance, together with her old colleague Lorraine Griggs’ sighting of somebody who looks a lot like Stewart and the remarkably similar disappearance exactly 17 years later of construction heir Carlton Flynn, sets in motion a new chain of violence and threatens to reveal all of Megan’s carefully hidden secrets. Eventually she reconnects with her old flame Ray Levine, a photographer who has hit the skids big time, and tells what she knows to Det. Broome of Atlantic City Homicide. But both men’s most protective instincts are challenged by a pair of wholesome killers calling themselves Barbie and Ken—and by the fact that Broome’s own boss is working against him.
A proficient but routine thriller in which you can tell for miles in advance who’s disposable and who’s slated for survival, marked by the virtual absence of the baroque plot twists fans of Coben (Live Wire, 2011, etc.) expect as their due.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95227-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the...
After an absence of five years, Hart finds more to mine in the fertile land of the Southern gothic.
Hart returns brimming with plotlines and melodramatics. For starters, there are three emotionally and physically wounded characters. Front and center stands Elizabeth Black, a detective on the police force in an unnamed North Carolina city. Feisty, irrepressible Elizabeth has been furloughed after an incident in a cellar in which she pumped 18 bullets into two men who had bound and raped an 18-year-old girl named Channing. "Hero Cop or Angel of Death?" ask headlines, as a formal investigation into possibly excessive force looms likely. Elizabeth is also obsessed with Adrian Wall, an ex-cop in prison for the murder of Julia Strange. Black insists he’s innocent; she also suspects she loves him. And so she ignores department orders to stay away from Wall, seeking him out soon after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile, in a vivid scene that opens the book, Julia Strange’s son, Gideon, a 14-year-old whose “thoughts [run] crooked sometimes,” lights out from home and his father, “an empty man,” to shoot Wall the morning he walks free. Elizabeth, Channing, and Gideon are linked by troubled relationships with their parents, and the offsprings’ efforts to surmount the discord becomes a major theme in the book. There are, as well, other pertinent tropes—Wall’s case eventually raises issues of police corruption and prison abuse. Threaded through the steadily paced plot is a series of cross-cuts to the first-person narration of an unidentified man, a lurking bogeyman who moves, unobserved, among the other characters as he kidnaps and tortures several women. His identity is not hard to guess, and the familiarity of his scenes, however chilling, mars the plotting. A protracted action scene resolves the strands of the plot, and a touching epilogue lends a closing note of poignancy.
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-38036-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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