Gittins (Secret Shelter, 2015, etc.) takes forever to navigate past the overlong flashbacks that dot the first half of this...
Gittins’ fourth novel updates the premise of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s memorably enigmatic little fable “Wakefield”—a man abandons his wife on a whim, moves one street away, then returns to her 20 years later on another whim—for the surveillance age.
Jack Connolly has always assumed he can trust Tia, the event planner who’s his frequent partner in business and bed. But maybe that’s just because he’s never thought about it. After all, Jack himself isn’t entirely trustworthy. His star as a noted photojournalist fell with the disclosure that he’d faked an iconic picture. So when he spots Tia in a briefly suggestive pose with Joseph, the co-owner of her agency, he can’t help wondering if she’s got something going. A nasty railroad accident outside London soon gives him his chance. He packs his bags, moves into a hotel, and waits to see how his ladylove reacts to her increasingly sharp suspicion that he was one of the casualties aboard the train. The refinement Jack adds to Hawthorne’s model is a battery of state-of-the-art surveillance devices that allow him to track Tia’s every move and, as long as she stays in their flat, catch well-nigh every facial expression. What he sees tells him that she’s clearly frantic, then genuinely grieved, and that she’s got secrets he’s never suspected. But nothing he sees persuades him to return. Like Hawthorne’s feckless hero, he keeps thinking from moment to moment that he’ll go back. But something keeps coming up to prevent him, mostly in the guise of faces from his past—his ex-lover Natsuo, heavy-handed dilettante Toby Vine, a light-fingered pawnbroker named Ben, and of course Dom, the insinuating surveillance expert—who suddenly turn up on his radar in unsettling new roles.
Gittins (Secret Shelter, 2015, etc.) takes forever to navigate past the overlong flashbacks that dot the first half of this tale. Readers who survive this extended setup, however, will find themselves irresistibly drawn into Jack’s paranoid world of self-induced claustrophobia.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78461-239-9
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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