It’s amazing that a pro like Patterson could have miscalculated so badly everything from the cluttered prologue, with its...
The normally reliable Patterson (Eclipse, 2009, etc.) disappoints with this tale of a new college president who insists on putting an old murder at the top of his agenda.
Sixteen years ago, black scholarship student Angela Hall was murdered and her body dumped at the base of the bell tower that serves as the focal point of Caldwell College’s campus. Under pressure from college officials, the Wayne, Ohio, police promptly arrested football player Steve Tillman. The case was straightforward. Steve had gotten drunk after a Caldwell football victory; hooked up with Angela despite racist remarks he’d earlier made to her twin brother Carl; and passed out with scratch marks from her fingernails on his back and no memory of the rest of the night. Now Steve’s best friend, football hero Mark Darrow, has returned to Caldwell from his successful Boston criminal-law practice at the behest of his old mentor, Prof. Lionel Farr. Mark is taking over the college presidency from Clark Durbin, forced to resign ostensibly for health problems but actually for embezzling nearly $1 million, though Durbin insists he didn’t touch it. Accepting the job with due reticence, Mark soon finds himself confronted by exactly the sorts of problems you’d expect: a professor who needs an immediate leave to deal with her husband’s suicide, another accused of sexual harassment, a host of alumni who want to know why they should empty their pockets for a school with such a checkered history. So naturally he decides to focus his energies on falling in love with Farr’s daughter Taylor, ten years his junior, and on reopening the investigation of Angela’s murder despite the universal sense that there’s nothing to reopen.
It’s amazing that a pro like Patterson could have miscalculated so badly everything from the cluttered prologue, with its flashbacks within flashbacks, to the screamingly obvious identity of the villain to Mark’s dreamy-eyed behavior when he finally realizes who he’s up against. Wait till next year.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8773-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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