Three generations' worth of love and obsession are the foundation of this tightly worked novel by the author of the popular Spenser series. Parker (Walking Shadow, p. 427, etc.) tells the century-long story of two families: the Irish Catholic, working-class Sheridans and the wealthy and privileged Boston WASP Winslows. They first meet in a hospital in Dublin in 1920, where Captain Conn Sheridan (of the IRA) is recovering from wounds received in the line of duty and Hadley Winslow, whose older banker husband, Thomas, is in Dublin on business, volunteers. They have an affair and Conn becomes obsessively attached to Hadley. She won't leave Thomas, Conn won't leave her, and, frightened at his persistence, Hadley betrays Conn to the British. Conn escapes from Kilmainham Jail and makes his way to Boston, where he marries, has a child, Gus, and becomes a successful police detective. He never recovers from Hadley's deceit, however, and when her beloved son, Tommy, rapes and murders a 12-year-old girl, Conn makes a deal with her: He will bury the case if she agrees to become his lover. He also blackmails her for money. When Corm dies, he leaves the facts of the case as a legacy to Gus, who continues to blackmail the Winslows. Gus also becomes a cop and has a loveless marriage, like his father's, but he adores his son, Chris, and does everything he can to ensure Chris's future success. Chris seems to be fulfilling his father's dreams — he becomes a lawyer, and then a professor of criminology at Harvard, and in 1993 is made special prosecutor to investigate a raging Irish gang war. But Chris doesn't realize that what he uncovers during his inquiry may destroy not only the gangs, but Chris's own family, and the family of the only woman he has ever loved — Grace Winslow. A thrilling game of cops-and-Brahmins. Parker is in fine form.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0440221463
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
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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