A well-paced, satisfying page-turner with an underlying dystopian concept that should keep readers awake at night.
A murder mystery presents a provocative hypothesis that should increase the ranks of conspiracy theorists.
The body of Henry Benson, an assistant editor in a small publishing house, is found on West 32nd Street in New York City, and Homicide Detective Kevin Reilly knows from the brutality of the slaying that this is no ordinary mugging. Benson’s head was smashed by a shovel: “Someone had…delivered world class crushing blows that pureed Henry’s skull between the weapon and the unforgiving concrete.” This was a revenge killing. All Reilly has to do is figure out who could have hated Henry this much. The detective’s search takes him into the back rooms of the publishing world, which sets up an indictment of the industry as a whole that should sound familiar to many aspiring authors. Within days, Reilly rushes out to Los Angeles, where a similar murder has taken place. This time, it is low-budget movie producer Murray Kantwell who has met the business end of a shovel. Cue in a secondary indictment, this one of the film industry. Both cases involve an intriguing manuscript by an unknown author. Reilly continues to follow the trail to San Francisco, where he finds himself the target of a pair of assassins in a supercharged motorcycle chase through the winding streets and dramatic hills of the city. The danger continues when he returns to New York. This is an action-packed thriller with a chilling premise that is more threatening than simple murder. Quinn (The Secrets of a Substitute Teacher, 2014, etc.) occasionally inserts indulgent descriptions (“Los Angeles sprawled like a platter” of low-rise hors d’oeuvres “across the miles between the sea and the surrounding hills”), but he also displays a superb sense of the rhythm of language. He can punctuate his settings with pithy, staccato observations: “The computer was on, the fireplace wasn’t.” Dialogue is usually pleasantly terse, in the familiar style of the detective genre. The few date references in the text indicate a possible 1980s time frame.
A well-paced, satisfying page-turner with an underlying dystopian concept that should keep readers awake at night.Pub Date: July 20, 2000
ISBN: 978-1-58500-601-4
Page Count: 244
Publisher: 1st Book Library
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal...
A gumbo seasoned with ghosts, love, and murder on the bayou.
When 30-something Declan Fitzgerald of Boston, a successful lawyer and a member of a large and loving family, breaks off his engagement to very suitable Jessica, he knows he needs to change his life. Lawyering is not fun anymore, so, recalling Manet Hall, an old deserted plantation house he once visited with law school classmate and New Orleans native Remy, he buys the property and moves down south. Declan is also a gifted craftsman, a born decorator, and very, very rich. Soon, he meets beautiful Lena, who’s visiting her grandmother Odette, Declan’s friendly Cajun neighbor. Declan is as certain that Lena is destined to be his wife as he was that Manet Hall would become his home. But, surprise, Lena has a troubled past (like the house) and is determined to resist Declan’s courtship. While he suits Lena and works on the place, Declan experiences troubling dreams. It seems he’s actually reliving the novel’s parallel story, which took place in 1899. In that year, the maid, Abbey Manet (from whom Lena, coincidentally, is descended, and who married wealthy Lucian Manet), was raped and murdered by her brother-in-law Julian as she nursed her baby daughter. Her body was dumped into the bayou by her mother-in-law, who despised her. And grief-stricken husband Lucian, away at the time, being told that Abbey had run off, committed suicide. Now, in an unconvincing twist of gender and reincarnation, it’s Declan who hears a baby crying , experiences childbirth and rape as the reincarnation of Abbey, while Lena is Lucian. The two accept all this with equanimity, and, Manet Hall’s secrets revealed, it becomes the setting for predictable and much foreshadowed resolutions.
Agreeably credible lovers and a neat piece of home-restoration compensate some for the hokey hauntings on the bayou. Loyal fans will enjoy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14824-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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