When the City of Angels goes haywire following the beating of Reginald Denny, the last person you want to be is a black detective in the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division. Charlotte Justice, who’s hearing her share of ethnic slurs from the back of the police bus trolling for rioters, gets beaten by her own colleagues when she tries to keep them off Lance Mitchell, an emergency-room doctor they find on King Boulevard past curfew. But Mitchell, a womanizer whose syndicated Love Doctor wife is doing everything she can to keep their messy divorce quiet, may not be worth Charlotte’s trouble, especially when his missing wallet is found under the corpse of Robert (“Cinque”) Lewis, the one-armed revolutionary who vanished after murdering Charlotte’s husband and baby daughter over ten years ago. Charlotte, who still can’t bring herself to clean out her late family’s things, is glad that her battles on Mitchell’s behalf bring her together with Mitchell’s boss Dr. Aubrey Scott, her onetime high-school flame, but she isn’t ready to let Aubrey as far into her life as he wants to come. Meantime, a trail of fresh casualties leads from Cinque Lewis’s Black Freedom Militia to gallery owner Reggie Peeples’s program to foster inner-city black artists. What’s the connection, and how do Charlotte’s own department, and Charlotte herself, fit in? Anthologist Woods (Spooks, Spies, and Private Eyes, 1995) puts an African-American spin on Sara Paretsky’s trademarks (the broad canvas filled with big events, the tough-as-the-boys heroine, the gimlet eye for urban corruption) in this important debut.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04680-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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