by Paul Charles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2018
Once again, it’s hard to resist a hero who realizes, “He just had a habit of opening his mouth and not knowing what was...
A welcome return for Brendy McCusker, the rent-a-cop who used to work for the Ulster Constabulary, and DI Lily O’Carroll, who still does.
Louis Bloom went to take out a bag of trash five minutes before the 9 PM television screening of The Fall and never returned. Normally his disappearance wouldn’t be investigated for two days, but his wife, Elizabeth, is the sister of Angela Larkin, whose husband is Superintendent Niall Larkin of the Ulster Royal Constabulary—or the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as it’s now called. So Lily and McCusker both get rousted from their beds in the dead of night to question the newly distressed wife and begin preliminary investigations. These quickly lead to a simple explanation of why Louis Bloom never came home: He’s lying stabbed to death in the nearby Friar’s Bush graveyard. Who would have wanted to kill an inoffensive lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast whose specialization was “The Politics of Love”? Maybe Al Armstrong, the platonic but exceedingly close friend Elizabeth asks to come over even before Lily and McCusker arrive. Maybe Bloom’s own friend Mariana Fitzgerald, a former escort who proves, along with her friend Murcia Woyda, that marrying one of your wealthy clients and retiring from the escort game is no guarantee of happily ever after. Maybe his administrative assistant, the whimsically named Leab David, who’s clearly having an affair with another of his colleagues at QUB. In the end, though, whodunit matters less than the many individual scenes Charles (One of Our Jeans Is Missing, 2016, etc.) crafts with such a careful eye on the sparks that can fly—some of them charming, some witty, some downright menacing—between characters who don’t happen to see eye to eye, or sometimes even to be operating in the same galaxy.
Once again, it’s hard to resist a hero who realizes, “He just had a habit of opening his mouth and not knowing what was going to come out.”Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8023-1362-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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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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 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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