by Owen Laukkanen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2017
Laukkanen combines great storytelling with deep compassion for the underdog. Despite brief references to earlier cases, you...
The sixth fast-paced entry in the Stevens-Windermere crime-fighting series (The Watcher in the Wall, 2016, etc.).
Runaway Ashlyn Southernwood knows better: “You don’t ever surf trains on the High Line,” because “there’s something evil up there” on the prowl for vulnerable young women like her. But she hops a High Line freight train anyway and doesn’t survive the Prologue. Soon, police find cellphone photos suggesting that someone is killing a lot of girls—forgotten girls—whom no one knows or cares about. But the violent-crimes task force of Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere cares a lot. He’s with Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, she’s from the FBI, and thriller readers won’t find a more dedicated series team anywhere. Windermere is the primary character, a “whip-smart” and beautiful African-American agent who's relentless in her pursuit of bad guys. There’s no obvious sexual tension between her and the happily married Stevens, who is close to being her equal. But there’s plenty of sexual tension in the “ghost rider,” who just can’t resist hopping the long-haul freight trains in search of more women to kill, especially the pretty ones. Stevens and Windermere know he’s killed at least 25. The villain is a survivalist who thinks of women as “ignorant beast[s], simple and cruel,” who have always rejected him. The former Army Ranger washout burns with anger and is “a damned evil soul” and “a creepy-ass dude” who finds killing to be fun. When one victim, Pamela Moody, barely escapes half dead from her injuries and the bitter winter cold, readers feel the chill. Maybe she can help the investigation, but only if she survives.
Laukkanen combines great storytelling with deep compassion for the underdog. Despite brief references to earlier cases, you can safely read the novels in any order.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17455-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Share your opinion of this book
More by Owen Laukkanen
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
29
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
by Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
New York Times Bestseller
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Karin Slaughter
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.