An imperfect but largely satisfying detective novel anchored by a charming and unforgettable heroine.
An aging PI on the trail of a decades-old cold case finds more than she bargained for in the wilds of Wyoming.
Old-money WASP Celine Watkins, 68, the titular protagonist of Heller's (The Painter, 2014, etc.) first detective novel, isn't your typical private eye. But most private eyes can't boast a 96 percent success rate, either. Contacted by the daughter of a National Geographic photographer who disappeared in Yellowstone two decades earlier under mysterious circumstances, Celine and husband Pete head out from Brooklyn Heights to Wyoming. As the couple retraces the photographer's last known steps, however, they find a mystery far larger than just a missing journalist. These scenes of sleuthing set against the Wyoming wilderness are beautifully rendered—given that Heller is also a contributing editor to Outside magazine and National Geographic Adventure, it's no wonder the book's best moments come in its evocative descriptions of the American West in early autumn. Celine herself is a delight, and seeing grizzled men ranging from bikers to gun salesmen to Bruce Willis repeatedly underestimate this tough little old lady is one of the novel's biggest joys. But Heller's authorial presence is so strong that his characters' own voices suffer. When his characters withhold information from each other, it seems to happen for no reason other than to generate suspense, and their dialogue, while at times quite witty, is never recognizably distinct from Heller's narration. In a particularly illustrative instance, Pete recounts a conversation he had with a woman named Marie: " 'She was a man-eater!’ Marie said in a baffled Haitian accent.” It's hard to imagine an actual human being using the phrase "Marie said in a baffled Haitian accent," yet such unbelievable lines appear again and again.
An imperfect but largely satisfying detective novel anchored by a charming and unforgettable heroine.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-451-49389-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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