The relentless barrage of gruesome murders and counter-accusations creates a legal thriller that's crude, grisly, horrific,...
"The combination of mass murder, black-market organ sales, torture and a handsome physician . . . dubbed Dr. Death by the tabloids" fuels Margolin's fifth transcendently commercial two-act thriller (The Undertaker’s Widow, 1998, etc.).
Act One kicks off when Bobby Vasquez, a Portland vice cop acting on a tip that St. Francis Hospital surgeon Vincent Cardoni has just purchased two kilos of cocaine from notorious drug supplier (and organ purchaser) Martin Breach, peeks into the fridge in Dr. Cardoni's isolated cabin and discovers two severed heads. After the cops dig up nine tortured bodies on the property, Cardoni is imprisoned without bail, even though he charmlessly insists that he's innocent and that his estranged wife, St. Francis surgical resident Justine Castle, must be framing him. Veteran criminal attorney Frank Jaffe and his latest associate, his daughter Amanda, get evidence that allows them, much to their discomfort, to get the charges dismissed, and their client promptly disappears, with every indication that he's dead. Four years later, Act Two opens when Dr. Castle is lured to another farm to discover a similar scene of sadistic torture just as the Multnomah County police arrive. Stridently proclaiming her own innocence, she tells Frank and Amanda that she's being framed by her dead husband, who must not be dead after all. Meantime, the Jaffes' investigators—including Bobby Vasquez, hungry for redemption after being kicked off the Portland force—are digging up evidence that makes both husband and wife look guilty as hell. Will Amanda, as Justine's lead attorney, figure out which of them to believe before she finds herself in the killer's torture chamber?
The relentless barrage of gruesome murders and counter-accusations creates a legal thriller that's crude, grisly, horrific, and often suspenseful, though never exactly scary, except when you wonder about the citizens who are buying this stuff.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019624-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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