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THE FAMILY WAY

Feisty Molly (Hush Now, Don’t You Cry, 2012, etc.) unravels another knotty case while providing insight into life just after...

Neither retirement nor pregnancy can put a good detective out to pasture.

Molly Murphy Sullivan has promised her police captain husband, Daniel, that she’ll quit investigating and settle down to become a housewife. Restless and uncomfortable in the heat of a New York City summer, she gets a letter addressed to her old agency: A couple from Ireland want her to find their niece Maureen O’Byrne, who worked for the Mainwaring family before she went missing. Surely Daniel won’t mind her asking a few innocent questions? But her husband is furious when she witnesses a baby kidnapping—one of the cases he’s working—while visiting a domestic agency in search of a maid. He wants her to travel to cooler Westchester, stay with his mother and give up detective work. Daniel would be even more angry if he knew that Molly had gone back to the agency, trying to track down the Mainwarings, and bumped into her younger brother Liam, who’s on the run from the English and illegally in the country on business for the Brotherhood, which will do anything to gain independence for Ireland. Molly agrees to go to Westchester when she learns that the Mainwarings live nearby. She asks her two neighbors to come stay at a nearby inn so that she’ll have an excuse to get away from her mother-in-law and keep sleuthing, a decision that will put her life in danger.

Feisty Molly (Hush Now, Don’t You Cry, 2012, etc.) unravels another knotty case while providing insight into life just after the turn of that other century.

Pub Date: March 5, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-250-01163-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013

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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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BLOOD TRAIL

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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