Yet another demonstration that the murderous enemies of forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta aren’t neutralized by life imprisonment or death. Especially not death.
After Dawn Kincaid was jailed for attacking Scarpetta in her own garage and nearly killing her, you’d think she’d be out of the picture. No such luck: Claiming self-defense, she’s commenced legal action against Scarpetta for attempted murder. Meanwhile, Kathleen Lawler, the mother who conceived Dawn by seducing 12-year-old Jack Fielding, Scarpetta’s late assistant, has invited Scarpetta to the Georgia Prison for Women, where she’s serving 10 years for DUI manslaughter, to chat. Their talk, like much of this tale’s overextended first half, is creepy but inconclusive, and Scarpetta comes away wondering what she’s gotten into this time—or what she failed to get out of last time (Port Mortuary, 2010, etc.). The pivotal figures turn out to be two women who never appear: Lola Daggette, GPFW’s celebrity inmate, who maintains her innocence even though she’s doing life for the slaughter of Savannah physician Clarence Jordan and his family, and Barrie Lou Rivers, the Deli Devil who fed arsenic to 17 patrons of her sandwich stand, 9 of them fatally, then choked to death in her cell hours before her date with the executioner’s needle. Working with her usual posse—her husband, profiler Benton Wesley; her hot-tempered investigator Pete Marino; and her niece Lucy, whose latest dead lover, Manhattan Sex Crimes prosecutor Jaime Berger, gives her a personal stake in the case—Scarpetta, working feverishly in the story’s much more rewarding second half, unearths the connections among a series of conveniently timed suicides in GPFW. She may even close the books on this set of monsters for good. Cornwell at her worst, Cornwell at her best, but mainly Cornwell at her most.
Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15802-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
A dark, quick-moving, suspenseful story stuffed full of psychological quirk and involution.
The latest thriller from Swanson (All the Beautiful Lies, 2018, etc.) is a twisty, fast-paced tale that depicts picket-fence suburbia's seamy, murderous underside.
Hen and her husband, Lloyd, have just left Boston for the tranquil burbs, and things are looking up for her. After a psychotic break sparked by the unsolved murder of a neighbor, Hen is on the mend, her bipolar disorder under control, her optimism resurgent, her career as an illustrator of dark YA books taking off. At a meet and greet she and her husband hit it off, or think they should, with their next-door neighbors Matthew and Mira, the only other childless couple nearby. But when they cross the driveway for a barbecue, the potential for neighborly coziness curdles. Hen notices a little fencing trophy on a shelf in Matthew's office and recognizes it—or wonders if she recognizes it—as one of the mementos the police reported was stolen from the murder scene in the city. When Hen recalls that the man killed was once a student at the prep school where Matthew teaches history, Hen grows suspicious of Matthew—and starts to stalk him. Is this a break in the case or the beginning of another fit of paranoia? And even if it's the former, who will believe Hen's suspicions given her earlier obsession with the case and the hospitalization it led to? Swanson is at his best in exploring the kinship—or what some see as the kinship—between artist and killer, one of the themes of Swanson's great model and forebear, Patricia Highsmith. Swanson isn't quite up to Highsmith's lofty mark, and he succumbs toward the end to a soap opera–like plot-twist-too-far...but for the most part, this novel delivers.
A dark, quick-moving, suspenseful story stuffed full of psychological quirk and involution.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283815-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
Rated B for badass.
A professional torturer on the run from her employers falls in with sexy twin brothers.
You probably know Meyer as the then-27-year-old Mormon housewife who woke up from a dream about vampires and gave the world Twilight, though in addition to that series she has already published one adult thriller (The Host, 2008). In her latest, she marries the genres of spy versus spy and throbbing romance novel with good results. Meet Juliana, or Alex, or Casey, or Chris—whatever her alias of the moment is, she’s an operative with a medical school background who specializes in chemically controlled torture and interrogation. Somewhere along the line, she learned too much about the secrets of her employers, and she now lives in a state of high-tech paranoia, sleeping in a bathtub wearing a gas mask in a secret location booby-trapped at every possible ingress. When her old boss calls her in for one last mission, she’s not sure she isn’t being double-crossed—but nonetheless proceeds with the kidnapping of Washington, D.C., schoolteacher Daniel Beach, who's purportedly part of a vile plot to release a virus that will wreak global doom. In fact, he is a man whose deep inner goodness is rivaled only by his scorching outer hotness—but our socially awkward virgin heroine won’t realize this until after she’s taken him to her secret lair, stripped him naked, strapped him to a table, and injected him with compounds that produce pure agony for 10 minutes at a time. The biochemical magic between them is even more powerful than the nasty drugs, and by the time his identical twin brother, a swashbuckling black-ops type, shows up to kill her and rescue him, love has bloomed in the torture chamber. As they begin to see through the layers of cross and double cross, the two agents decide to join forces and go into hiding together, with the brother of course, on a ranch in Texas with a pack of trained superdogs. A tale of skulduggery, bodice rippery, and shoot-'em-up action unfolds, complete with help from a luscious mistress of disguise who could have stepped right out of a James Bond novel.
Rated B for badass.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38783-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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