The author of the best-selling California Dreamers (1981, etc.) returns after 15 years in the Hollywood salt mines with a strongly plotted family novel/Frenchified thriller that crosses over into territory well mined by Peter Mayle and others. Chez Danton, a succulent and favored restaurant in the town of Aix-en-Provence, is owned by the parents of Commander Michel Danton, chief investigator of the Special Circumstances Section of the Judicial Police, who works only on the most difficult homicides when he’s not helping stock the restaurant and perform his other filial duties. Michel grew up in the restaurant trade and only abandoned it when he became bewitched by the rhapsody of the process and solution of unsolved murders. Now, he’s on sick leave, recovering from four shotgun blasts, when his girlfriend Yvette, a TV crime reporter, abandons him for Detective Sergeant Paul Corbel, who’s investigating a double homicide that Michel feels he himself should handle. Someone has beheaded a young man, then raped and strangled his girlfriend. We soon find out that the someone is American psychopath and serial killer Darrell Vernon Boynton, nicknamed Boy, “a ringer for Brad Pitt” who feels penniless and adrift in France after following his college girlfriend, Maddie Gold, there. For Boy, each murder is a taste treat. So, when Maddie turns some tricks at Madame Louise’s brothel to bring in some cash, but Madame stiffs Maddie and doesn’t pay her for her labors, Boy grows a fatal dislike for Aix’s sole procuress—and Madame Louise becomes what for Boy is a feast of giggles. Boy looks forward to giving Maddie’s pretty French tutor and chaperone, karate-trained Jennifer Bowen, a roll on the grass, but first he and Maddie must bond by formidably violating Louise with a curling iron, while Michel finds himself falling for Jennifer. No higher aspirations than the bestseller lists, but swaggeringly well-written. Smart, magnetic dialogue, suspenseful but very ghoulish, scenic, and filmable. Some pages you’ll read through your fingers.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86628-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
In Donlea’s skillful hands, this story of obsession, murder, and the search for truth is both a compassionate character...
Forensic reconstructionist Rory Moore knows her odd quirks and obsessive habits are a strength when she’s re-creating a crime, but when she investigates a 40-year-old serial-killer case, even she isn’t sure she can handle what she’s uncovering.
Rory works for the Chicago Police Department, reconstructing homicides. She’s so good at her work that Detective Ron Davidson not only tolerates her preferences (no touching, little eye contact, minimal social interaction), but allows her frequent breaks to recover from her total immersion in her work. One day Davidson asks Rory to meet with the father of a murdered young woman. Rory’s calming hobby is repairing china dolls, and the father wants his daughter’s doll repaired as a memento. But as Rory explores the woman’s murder, she gets pulled into the case of The Thief, a suspected serial killer who murdered young women in Chicago in 1979. Then, after Rory’s attorney father dies, she finds that he had been representing The Thief, who is about to be paroled. Alternating in time, the story follows Angela Mitchell, a woman with autism who becomes obsessed with studying the murders in 1979; and, in 2019, Rory, as one discovery leads to more surprises and questions. Donlea (Don’t Believe It, 2018, etc.) so vividly describes the tension the two women feel that the reader stays tense, too, as the stories escalate. He's also so careful about describing his characters' particularities that neither woman is portrayed as bizarre (although the people around them may think they are) but rather highly intelligent, tormented women determined to find the truth.
In Donlea’s skillful hands, this story of obsession, murder, and the search for truth is both a compassionate character study and a compelling thriller.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1381-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Advertising executive Patterson doubles neither our pleasure nor our fun by giving us two intense, Hannibal Lecter-type murderers for the price of one in an improbable and hopelessly derivative mess of a thriller. Feds and local authorities on both coasts are baffled by a pair of serial killers targeting beautiful young women: The Gentleman Caller works the scene in sunny L.A., where he brutally murders and dismembers his prey; his counterpart back East, who calls himself Casanova, trolls the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area for sexy coeds to victimize. Their MOs provide plenty of fodder for an author trying to cook up a work of psychological terror: Both are powerful, handsome, brilliant (natch), commit perfect crimes, and, despite their busy schedules, manage to keep in touch with each other. To catch them, you obviously need a perfect crime fighter. Enter Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., detective/psychologist hero of bestselling Along Came A Spider (1993), who gets dragged into all this after his niece Naomi, a student at Duke University, vanishes. Working with the authorities and a medical student named Kate McTiernan, who was lucky enough to escape Casanova's clutches, Cross begins to understand how the two dueling psychos operate. Just in the nick of time, too, because the Gentleman Caller, on the run from the law out West, decides that nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina with his old buddy Casanova. So, what does Cross, whose favorite niece is now in the clutches of two sickos, do? Fall in love with Kate McTiernan, of course, in an ill-placed romantic subplot intended to raise the stakes in the deadly cat-and-mouse game. Does Cross save Naomi? Are the two killers brought to justice or, at the very least, consigned to gory demises? Who cares? As a storyteller, Patterson is a great ad copywriter.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-69370-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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