edited by Otto Penzler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2017
Weighing in at a svelte 928 pages, Penzler’s omnibus is equally impossible to pick up and put down.
Black Lizard’s latest plus-size anthology, reprinting 72 stories, practically all of them published in the U.S. and U.K. over the past two centuries, is a monument to bad behavior.
With obvious exceptions like Hannibal Lecter and Count Dracula, fictional criminals have rarely attracted the same attention as fictional detectives because they’ve rarely had the same staying power. Even so, veteran anthologist Penzler (Bibliomysteries, 2017, etc.) has assembled a lineup of franchise luminaries likely to quicken the pulse of many a genre fan: Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, E.W. Hornung’s A.J. Raffles, Thomas W. Hanshew’s Hamilton Cleek, Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin, Clifford Ashdown’s Romney Pringle, K. and Hesketh Prichard’s Don Q, Sax Rohmer’s Dr. Fu Manchu, Frederick Irving Anderson’s The Infallible Godahl and Sophie Lang, O. Henry’s Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, Jack Boyle’s Boston Blackie, Gerald Kersh’s Karmesian, Edgar Wallace’s Four Square Jane, Leslie Charteris’ Simon Templar, Erle Stanley Gardner’s Ed Jenkins, Lester Leith, Paul Pry, and the Patent Leather Kid, Edward D. Hoch’s Nick Velvet, Robert L. Fish’s Kek Huuygens, Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr, Martin Ehrengraf, and John Keller, Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder, and of course Dracula. The most notable omission, mentioned in Penzler’s brief Introduction but unaccountably absent from the table of contents, is Melville Davisson Post’s crooked lawyer, Randolph Mason. Although these franchise entries are naturally of varying quality, many of them mark their villains’ (or their rogues’—Penzler’s conscientious attempt to categorize every single one of these nefarious leads as either one or the other or both seems a pointless exercise) first appearances, giving this collection an added historical interest. Newcomers may want to begin with the most celebrated nonfranchise tales: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher,” Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” Thomas Burke’s “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole,” Ben Hecht’s “The Fifteen Murderers,” and William Irish’s “After-Dinner Story.” Old hands may note that bad guys can make just as big a splash in a short story as in a long one: the lengthiest item here, Donald E. Keyhoe’s pulp novella The Mystery of the Golden Skull, packs no greater punch than the oldest story of all, one of the shortest, and one of the most shockingly unexpected from its source, Washington Irving’s “The Story of a Young Robber.”
Weighing in at a svelte 928 pages, Penzler’s omnibus is equally impossible to pick up and put down.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43248-7
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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edited by Amor Towles ; series editor: Otto Penzler
BOOK REVIEW
edited by Otto Penzler
BOOK REVIEW
edited by Otto Penzler
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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