by Patricia Wynn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2017
A gripping series continues with energy and thrills to spare.
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The latest book in Wynn’s (Acts of Faith, 2014, etc.) historical detective series finds the hero known as “Blue Satan” and lady-in-waiting Hester Kean investigating the murder of an English lord.
In October 1716, Hester is touring the recently completed St. Paul’s Cathedral—one of London’s jewels—with her cousin Mary Mayfield, their escort James, and the son of the building’s designer, Christopher Wren. Among the architectural marvels of the structure is the fact that a whisper on one side of its central dome can be heard with remarkable clarity on the other, so when Hester hears a raspy voice saying, “I shall kill him with my bare hands,” it sends shivers down her spine. Later, when Mary’s distasteful suitor, Lord Wragby, is murdered, Hester sets upon a quest to discover his killer and exonerate James. However, to do so, she’ll need the help of her absent fiance, the Viscount St. Mars, who has a secret identity as a highwayman known as “Blue Satan.” When readers last saw him, Hester had joyfully accepted his proposal of marriage—but then she abruptly fled his presence to deal with a family emergency. As a result, there are not only mysteries to solve in this novel; there’s also a relationship that has yet to get off the ground. It’s clear in this latest installment that Wynn has lost nothing off her fastball. The mystery that she constructs here is just as original and exciting as the one in her previous volume, and her characters are charming but never precious. Furthermore, the setting feels like both a faithful reconstruction of 18th-century Europe and refreshingly modern at the same time. Readers who’ve been to London will likely be familiar with St. Paul’s, but Anglophiles will also find many other Easter eggs in the text. Ardent fans of the series will also be pleased to know that this book finally resolves Hester and St. Mars’ will-they-or-won’t-they romance—though, perhaps, in unexpected ways.
A gripping series continues with energy and thrills to spare.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-935421-08-5
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Pemberley
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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...
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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
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by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
BOOK REVIEW
by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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