by Paul Doherty ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2013
Close attention will reward readers with well-researched historical information, from the minutiae of everyday living to the...
A Dominican priest is tasked yet again with solving several locked-room murders.
In 1381, John of Gaunt is regent of England. He is a fierce and ambitious man whose authority is challenged by rebels who call themselves the Upright Men. Gaunt invites Brother Athelstan and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, to a mystery play performed by the Straw Men, Gaunt’s personal acting troupe. The performance at the Tower of London is interrupted by the deaths and wounding of guests, and two severed heads are left at the scene. So Gaunt orders Athelstan, who’s well-known for his knack for solving difficult problems (Bloodstone, 2012, etc.), to unmask the killer. When one of the troupe is found dead at the foot of the Tower, it looks as if he was escaping after the attack, but Athelstan is not convinced. Athelstan is already walking a fine line between the regent and the Upright Men, who each have spies in his parish and even in the highest reaches of their enemies’ councils. Perhaps the deaths have something to do with the mysterious woman Gaunt has locked in the Tower. Rumors swirl amid street battles and revenge killings in the squalid, frozen streets of London. More murders follow before Athelstan can gather up the pieces of the cunning puzzle and put them together to solve the crimes.
Close attention will reward readers with well-researched historical information, from the minutiae of everyday living to the public events in the lives of the rich and powerful. Mystery buffs, however, are likely to reach the answer before Athelstan.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78029-037-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Creme de la Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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 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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