The protagonist’s second run-in with conspiracy results in more exhilaration; readers will surely welcome a third.
Attorney Mike Marchetti returns to investigate unexplained deaths on a Hawaiian island while an epidemic plagues the U.S. mainland in Holcroft’s (Patriot’s Blood, 2014) latest thriller.
Marchetti’s romantic Kauai getaway with reporter girlfriend Vicki Steele is wrecked when someone attacks the couple. Vicki needs to recuperate, and Marchetti, with his Dallas law partner buying him out, spends his free time tracking down the assailant—possibly related to terrorists whose plans the attorney had previously thwarted. He likewise agrees to help Vicki’s friend Janine Nichols, one of several locals wanting answers regarding suspicious deaths, starting with Janine’s close friend reporter Brad Vaughn, a “super-cautious” driver killed in a car accident. Reteaming with retired detective/private eye Tom Shannon, Marchetti zeroes in on one of Brad’s stories: a false-flag operation. At the same time, deaths in various mainland states, all symptomatically identical, seem to confirm a viral outbreak. As the CDC searches for Ground Zero, some in the White House surmise that the virus is an orchestrated strike against the U.S. Villains, meanwhile, are devising something even more treacherous, set for an upcoming event in Honolulu, which may intersect with Marchetti and Tom’s investigation. The two men make headway on at least one of the cases, inadvertently putting themselves in the path of a very dangerous individual who excels at keeping things quiet via abductions or murder. Holcroft, as in his preceding novel, builds a credible back story for his protagonist. Marchetti, for example, though still only a lawyer, is already invested—find the person(s) who attacked him and Vicki —before Janine asks for a favor. There’s ample coverage for the subplots, including agencies discussing measures to prevent the virus spreading further and retaliation against the culprits they believe are responsible. Most but not all of the baddies are known, and despite making a few avoidable mistakes (for example, mapping out the nefarious plan for a hostage), their scheme is both methodical and brilliant. Marchetti, a former Marine, once again winds up immersed in action before it’s over, while the ending takes a surprising turn and closes with a lingering uneasiness.
The protagonist’s second run-in with conspiracy results in more exhilaration; readers will surely welcome a third.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5370-5858-0
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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