Sturdy variations on an old theme, short on realism, long on expertly frayed nerves.
MacDonald’s latest matron-in-distress is a bride who fears that her bridegroom is the man who nearly killed her and intends to try again.
Although Burke Heisler, the psychiatrist who runs the New Jersey clinic where Emma Hollis works, has made it painfully clear that he doesn’t reciprocate her crush on him, things have worked out better for Emma than for her boss. Burke’s marriage to Emma’s old roommate, mercurial poet Natalie White, has ended with her suicide, but his introduction of Emma to his old friend, freelance writer David Webster, has led to a whirlwind romance, a welcome pregnancy and a wedding. Hours after the nuptials, however, Emma’s idyll ends with shocking suddenness at her honeymoon cabin in the Pine Barrens. While David’s stepped out to chop firewood, she’s attacked by a masked stranger wielding an axe. She and the baby she’s carrying survive the assault, but a providential hunter who comes to her aid isn’t so lucky. On top of her physical injuries and her psychological trauma, Emma has to deal with the broad insinuations of Lt. Joan Atkins, the cop who’s convinced that David wanted Emma’s money but didn’t want to wait for it. Can Emma really trust the man who swears he hasn’t been to the cabin since he was a child even though a witness has placed him there a few months ago, a man who keeps his desk drawer locked and lies about the reason, a man whose sudden disappearances coincide all too neatly with the continuing attacks on her? MacDonald (The Girl Next Door, 2004, etc.) stocks her cast with other guilty-looking parties, from the oily second husband of Emma’s mother to a disgruntled father convinced his daughter’s death from anorexia is Emma’s fault. And although Atkins never considers female suspects, there are plenty of them as well.
Sturdy variations on an old theme, short on realism, long on expertly frayed nerves.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6955-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
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