Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result...
Ambitious attempt to focus all manner of contemporary suburban malaise on one woman’s murder.
The floater lacks a head, and Riverside (NY) Police Chief Harold Baltimore’s first impulse is to dismiss the victim as somebody from the lesser side of the tracks, but the liposuction scars mark it, chillingly, as a local. And the missing-persons report online sports-memorabilia salesman Jeffrey Lanier files on returning from a trip to raise venture capital instantly makes it clear that his wife Sandi’s rounds of soccer carpooling and shopping expeditions for 22 Love Lane have come to an end. Budding photographer Lynn Stockdale Schulman is devastated, not just by the loss of her best friend, but by the way Det. Lt. Michael Fallon, a lifelong Riversider who recently lost his bid for the Chief’s job, is taking the opportunity of questioning her to rekindle their high-school romance. Indifferent to her loving husband Barry, an attorney whose biotech firm is having its own problems, and to her own indifference, Michael chats up Lynn, gropes her, pulls Barry over, and arrests him. When Barry, oblivious to just how touchy a history Lynn has with Michael, urges her to file a harassment suit against him, the pot boils so furiously that it’s hard to remember poor Sandi’s murder. But Michael’s loose-cannon behavior isn’t the only thing blurring Blauner’s focus. A torrent of exhaustively observed detail—the reactions of Lynn’s reading-circle friends, the reluctance of the Salvadorean immigrant who withdrew her harassment charges against Michael, the town’s ache over the locals killed in the World Trade Center—give it a sociological richness. Underneath, though, the story is starkly simple: Who loosed the snake in the designer garden, and what are the locals going to do about it?
Every gossipy soul has a job, a spouse, and a hidden past Blauner (Man of the Hour, 1999, etc.) knows all about. The result is a whodunit that thinks it’s an epic.Pub Date: May 14, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-09873-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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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