Further evidence, if any was needed, that all the author’s heroes are direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Silvis’...
Will Sgt. Ryan DeMarco, already so traumatized in his first recorded case (Two Days Gone, 2017), ever fully rejoin the human race? Seven dead girls do their best to pull him back in.
Still haunted by the death of his friend professor Thomas Huston and his own troubled family history, DeMarco’s at the point of announcing his retirement from the Pennsylvania State Police when his lover, Trooper Jayme Matson, and his supervisor, Cmdr. Kyle Bowen, scheme to get him to take a temporary leave instead. Now that he’s got nothing to do but wrestle demons, from his estranged wife to their baby son, who was killed in a car accident, it seems as if it might be positively therapeutic for him to look into a case that swims into his ken during a visit to Jayme’s family in Aberdeen, Kentucky: the discovery four years ago of the skeletonized corpses of seven young women immured in a wall in the First Baptist Church. The victims, all African-American teenagers, had gone missing between 1998 and 2004. The local police had long given up the case, and the gruesome discovery provided no new leads they could follow. But a group of three elderly citizens calling themselves the Da Vinci Cave Irregulars think DeMarco and Jayme are just the people to solve a case that weighs as heavily on the town as DeMarco’s memories do on him. Although DeMarco quickly identifies four leading suspects—First Baptist pastor Eli Royce, former church caretaker Chad McGintey, Chad’s missing successor, Virgil Helm, and pedophile ex-teacher Aaron Henry—the investigation proceeds at a glacial pace. For every two steps forward, DeMarco takes three more steps back into his childhood abuse by his father and his continued mourning for his son. And no matter how keen his interest in the case becomes, it remains overshadowed by his fear: “I’m becoming my father.”
Further evidence, if any was needed, that all the author’s heroes are direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Silvis’ own fictionalizations of (Disquiet Heart, 2002, etc.) successfully dramatized without exorcising.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4691-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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