A dark and often grim homicide tale, but unrelentingly tense and never easy to predict.
Cops chase a killer targeting female college students and emulating the murders of Jack the Ripper in this thriller.
When the mutilated body of university student Jessica Hayden turns up, homicide detectives Mike Delaney and Dan Griffin are on the scene. Sgt. Victoria “Vicky” Bailey of the Violent Crimes Unit subsequently joining the case, however, will not make things less challenging for Mike. The couple’s relationship is currently on the skids, with Vicky wanting more emotion from Mike than he’s willing to give. But the investigation changes drastically once Mike receives a letter from the killer, signed Jack the Ripper and promising more murders to come. The cops have a heap of suspects from which to choose, though Mike favors professor John Foster, who reputedly had an affair with Jessica. After a second murder claims another female student, Vicky surmises that the killer has a link somehow to the university. Another letter follows as well, this time the writer sending visceral proof that he is indeed the murderer. It likewise seems he isn’t merely adopting Jack the Ripper as a name but duplicating his homicides, right down to the five deaths attributed to the infamous London serial killer. Certain that the new Ripper will soon be prowling the campus again, Vicky acts as a decoy, putting herself in danger to stop a vicious murderer. The story’s influx of suspicious characters makes pinpointing the guilty party exceedingly difficult—but undeniably fun. John, for one, is seeing psychiatrist Dr. Noel Oliver for, among other things, blackouts, happening roughly the same time as the murders. Similarly, campus security officer Armand Calo creepily leers at and occasionally approaches female students, while phys ed department director Alex Pollard is, rather ominously, growing bored with his extensive porn collection. Anez (The Blue Mirror, 2016, etc.) offers no relief with a sympathetic protagonist; Mike’s emotional detachment ultimately lumps him in with the other suspects, and it’s not clear how or why Vicky’s fallen for someone so cold. Nonetheless, scores of sordid, potential killers make for a truly unsettling experience and a genuine mystery, while a smashing twist in the latter half will stun some readers and upset most.
A dark and often grim homicide tale, but unrelentingly tense and never easy to predict.Pub Date: May 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5327-5550-7
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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