Readers sucked in by the torrid pace may well overlook the ramshackle plotting. Even the final surprise falls flat.
The murder of her first boss and mentor leads Channel 10 News director Clare Carlson (Below the Fold, 2019, etc.) to a serial killer of the worst kind: the one whose victims have never been connected to each other.
Newspaper editor Martin Barlow may have retired, but he still can’t resist a great story. And this one, he tells Clare, is “the biggest story of my life,” one that starts with New York District Attorney Terri Hartwell and leads to “more than one murder. Maybe lots of them.” When Marty’s beaten to death the next day outside the town house where he lives with his daughter’s family, Clare knows she has to follow the hints he’s left her about the wraithlike killer he’s dubbed The Wanderer. But she can’t imagine what Hartwell’s rumored political aspirations have to do with the stabbing of high school cheerleader Becky Bluso in Eckersville, Indiana, nearly 30 years ago. Her brief visit to a Chelsea house of rough-sex prostitution reveals nothing more substantive than a warning that there’s no story here and she should lay off it. Although she uses her relationship with her married ex-lover, Scott Manning, who’s now with the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit, to maneuver herself into the FBI investigation of five murders linked by DNA, her attempt to link backroom political operative Russell Danziger, who’s been working with Hartwell, backfires when his own DNA isn’t a match. Meanwhile, she frets about getting scooped, getting fired, and getting shut out by Linda Nesbitt, the daughter in Virginia she’s never acknowledged as hers. Buffeted by a perfect storm of crimes ranging from political shenanigans to serial homicide, Clare can only hope that “a big story always made everything better.”
Readers sucked in by the torrid pace may well overlook the ramshackle plotting. Even the final surprise falls flat.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60809-357-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oceanview
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
O'Brien proves to be the Oliver Stone of literature, reiterating the same Vietnam stories endlessly without adding any insight. Politician John Wade has just lost an election, and he and his wife, Kathy, have retired to a lakeside cabin to plan their future when she suddenly disappears. O'Brien manages to stretch out this simple premise by sticking in chapters consisting of quotes from various sources (both actual and fictional) that relate to John and Kathy. An unnamed author — an irritating device that recalls the better-handled but still imperfect "Tim O'Brien" narrator of The Things They Carried (1990) — also includes lengthy footnotes about his own experiences in Vietnam. While the sections covering John in the third person are dry, these first-person footnotes are unbearable. O'Brien uses a coy tone (it's as though he's constantly whispering "Ooooh, spooky!"), but there is no suspense: The reader is acquainted with Kathy for only a few pages before her disappearance, so it's impossible to work up any interest in her fate. The same could be said of John, even though he is the focus of the book. Flashbacks and quotes reveal that John was present at the infamous Thuan Yen massacre (for those too thick-headed to understand the connection to My Lai, O'Brien includes numerous real-life references). The symbolism here is beyond cloying. As a child John liked to perform magic tricks, and he was subsequently nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his fellow soldiers — he could make things disappear, get it? John has been troubled for some time. He used to spy on Kathy when they were in college, and his father's habit of calling the chubby boy "Jiggling John" apparently wounded him. All of this is awkwardly uncovered through a pretentious structure that cannot disguise the fact that there is no story here. Sinks like a stone.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 061870986X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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