Less backstory and more prominent roles for the bad guys might have given this more edge.
Fast-paced thriller gives a new twist to the familiar premise of the past catching up to an escaped killer with a new identity.
The twist is that the murderous past belongs to a Southern housewife. Vera Lee Gifford was only 16 when she killed two men in a topless bar in South Florida and then the wife of her super-shady lawyer, Lance Underwood. There were extenuating circumstances: Before the killings, Lance had fired up the stunning little blonde with drugs. Vera Lee went to jail, but a year later got out in an escape engineered by another inmate, Thelma Jackson. Using information she had picked up in the joint, Vera Lee presented herself to a sweet, grieving couple who adopted her and gave her the name of their dead daughter. Now, Patsy Palmer lives in Charlotte, N.C. She’s a successful realtor, a loving wife and a model mom; no one knows her secret. The story opens with Thelma’s murder in Gainesville; the detective on the case is Rodney Ellis, who arrested Vera Lee back in 1976. Rodney, clearly intended to be the novel’s second lead, is dutifully given a chance to display his human qualities during visits to his dying partner, but Patsy/Vera Lee is the star of the show. It becomes clear that she’s still haunted by childhood memories of an abusive stepfather, a mother who disappeared and a younger sister she abandoned. MacEnulty combines the murder investigation with Patsy’s increasingly desperate struggle to maintain a façade of normalcy. While the author successfully spliced drugs, crime and lost souls in previous thrillers like The Language of Sharks (2004), here she loses control of her material. A blackmail attempt, a second murder and two kidnappings climax with a wholly unbelievable dénouement in a Florida lighthouse as a hurricane hits land.
Less backstory and more prominent roles for the bad guys might have given this more edge.Pub Date: March 27, 2006
ISBN: 1-85242-468-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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