So many murders, so many plotters, so much churn that you may wonder if you accidentally picked up a collection of short...
Portland attorney Robin Lockwood (The Third Victim, 2017) gets a second case—or rather a perfect torrent of second cases.
Outraged that the police have granted bail to college football star Blaine Hastings, who's accused of raping her daughter, Randi, during a frat party, Maxine Stark wants Robin to sue the pants off the guy. Blaine has big pants, too, since his father, insurance executive Blaine Sr., has money to spare. Armed with DNA evidence, Robin and her trusty investigator, Jeff Hodges, are so successful against Blaine’s attorney, Doug Armstrong, that Blaine’s bail gets revoked, he’s convicted of the crime, and he’s resting comfortably in jail when Jessica Braxton lodges her own accusation of rape against an unknown she remembers only as “Ray,” and Ray’s DNA turns out to be the same as Blaine’s. How can the poor boy possibly have assaulted a second victim while he was locked up? The presiding judge, unable to answer this question, grants Blaine bail once more while he awaits a new trial, and he promptly takes off—very wisely in view of the criminal complications about to spring up from every corner in Multnomah County and far beyond. Doug’s law partner, Frank Nylander, is beaten to death in his own office; Nylander’s client Leonard Voss, who’d sued Norcross Pharmaceuticals for causing his incapacitating stroke, is murdered along with his wife; and Norcross attorney Tyler Harrison III turns up dead in a vacant lot in Manhattan. Closer to home, Margolin reveals that slimy prosecutor Rex Kellerman has embarked on his own one-man carnival of crime, from sleeping with Doug Armstrong’s wife to meddling with forensic evidence. What does all this have to do with the alibi Blaine Hastings has for that second rape—an alibi so perfect that it casts serious doubt on the DNA evidence that convicted him in the first place? Not a whole lot: The connections among different felonies in this woolly tale are as loose as all those lawyers’ connections to the truth.
So many murders, so many plotters, so much churn that you may wonder if you accidentally picked up a collection of short stories.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-11752-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.
“It is a dangerous time to be alive.” Indeed, as this fast-paced thriller by seasoned mysterian Pavone (The Travelers, 2016, etc.) proves.
A siren wails in Paris, a once-rare sound often heard in these times of terror. It’s gone off because a jihadi has strapped a bomb to himself and is standing in front of the Louvre, “in the epicenter of Western civilization,” waiting for his moment. But is he a jihadi? Who’s put him up to this dastardly deed, and why? That’s for Kate Moore, deep-cover CIA agent, “sidewalk-swimming in a sea of expat moms,” to suss out. Kate lives in a shadow world, so hidden away that even her hedge-fund-master husband doesn’t have a clue about what she does: “Dexter has been forced to accept that she’s entitled to her secrets,” Pavone writes, adding, “He’s had plenty of his own.” Indeed, and in the shadowy parallel world of speculative finance, he’s teamed up with a fast-living entrepreneur who wants nothing more than to become superrich and run off with his “assistant-concubine.” Hunter Forsyth is about to announce a huge deal, but suddenly he’s disappeared, whisked away by shadowy people who, by the thin strings of suspense, have something to do with that bomb across town. So does a vengeful young mom, strapped to a useless husband and bent on payback for a long-ago slight. All this is red meat to Kate, who’s tired of the domestic life, no matter how much a sham, and is happier than a clam when “running her network of journalists, bloggers, influencers, as well as drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and cops, plus diplomats and soldiers, maitre d’s and concierges and bartenders and shopkeepers.” With all those players, mercenaries, and assorted bad guys thrown into the mix, you just know that the storyline is going to be knotty, and it resolves in a messy spatter of violence that’s trademark Pavone and decidedly not for the squeamish.
A satisfying puzzler, one to shelve alongside le Carré, Forsyth, and other masters of foreign intrigue.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6150-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Virginia Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta (Cruel and Unusual, 1993, etc.) has given up smoking and strayed far enough from her high-pressure office to act as a consulting profiler for the FBI, but her nerves are just as frayed at Quantico, especially since her rebellious niece Lucy is a computer-whiz trainee for the Engineering Research Facility down the hall. Scarpetta's latest case is ugly even by her standards: the North Carolina sex murder of Emily Steiner, 11, whose forensics are so contradictory that Scarpetta wants to exhume her for a second autopsy. Before she can do so, North Carolina Bureau investigator Max Ferguson, returning home from Quantico, dies, apparently of autoerotic asphyxia, and his local contact winds up in the hospital with a heart attack. Scarpetta scurries to work out how and why Temple Gault, an apparent serial killer who's the leading suspect in Emily's murder, might have killed Ferguson—and what to make of her gruesome discovery in Ferguson's freezer. No sooner has she finished the grisly re-examination of Emily, than word comes from Quantico that Lucy's sneaked into an unauthorized area after hours and is getting washed out of the program. Scarpetta's two nightmares come together with a crash—a car crash that sends Lucy to the hospital and Scarpetta out to the field to run forensics on her own automobile. As always, tension is ratcheted up, rather unconvincingly, by plots whose interconnection is never quite clear and by the constant friction between Scarpetta and her niece; her sister; her FBI lover, Benton Wesley; her boorish buddy, Capt. Pete Marino; and Emily's mother, with whom Marino is having an affair. But beneath the welter of quarrels and coincidences is as insidious a study of evil as Cornwell has turned in. (Literary Guild main selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-684-19597-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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