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ENSNARED

A moving—sometimes too quickly—story about personal relationships, politics and the meaning we derive from both.

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A bored, middle-aged, British coach driver finds an affair, adventure and intrigue in Ireland.

After his father’s passing in World War II, Peter and his mum move to Ireland to begin a new life; however, just as he’s becoming adjusted, he’s shipped back to England for employment. From there, Peter finds new work on a lathe, meets a woman, gets her pregnant, marries her, settles into the bus-driving business, gets deadly bored with his wife and local life, heads up a coach service between England and Ireland and starts an affair with a young hotel hostess in Limerick—all within but a few pages. The breezy first-person narration of Peter’s life helps get readers quickly into the atmosphere of the story, but often builds psychological firewalls between Peter’s actions and his conscience. For a first-person narration, Peter is rarely caught dwelling on the absurdity of some of his flaws and the admirability of many of his strengths. It’s revealed to be quite possible that Peter is being manipulated by his acquaintance Patrick into carrying illicit materials sent to England care of the Irish Republican Army. But Peter, apparently in a fog because of his affair with the young, married Mary (they often make love only a few rooms away from her drunken husband), seems slow to put the pieces together or to seriously question the terrors in which he may well be intimately involved. Nonetheless, Peter, with his pluck, wit and basic tendency toward goodness, eventually develops, as does the narrative and its mysteries. Indeed, much of the political intrigue, striking the familiar themes associated with Ireland’s troubles (e.g. religion, family, fierce blood loyalties), is veiled allegory for navigating through the treacherous personal territories of marriage, fidelity, friendship and career. The novel is typeset in something like Comic Sans, which is an unfortunate distraction because, as the novel develops and Peter finally learns who his real friends and loves are, Lewis crafts heartrendingly moving, authentic lessons to be taken seriously from Peter’s exciting—but not always sensible—sympathetic life.

A moving—sometimes too quickly—story about personal relationships, politics and the meaning we derive from both.

Pub Date: April 19, 2011

ISBN: 978-1456774431

Page Count: 251

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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THE A LIST

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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