A suavely sturdy suspenser, first published in the UK in 2005, that manages better than most Goddards to lead its...
Twenty three years after an unsolved kidnapping, an anonymous letter reopens a case involving the latest in Goddard’s long line of innocent, compromised bystanders.
July 27, 1981. David Umber, a graduate student at Cambridge whose project is identifying the 18th-century whistle-blower known only as Junius, has gone to the town of Avebury to meet a man named Griffin, who’s promised him a peek at an old edition of Junius’s correspondence with a remarkable inscription. Griffin never shows up, so Umber is sitting alone watching in stupefaction when someone snatches two-year-old Tamsin Hall from Sally Wilkinson, her nanny, and runs over Tamsin’s sister Miranda, seven, when she gives chase. Drawn together by their shocked inability to prevent the tragedy, Umber and Sally become lovers, then spouses, then exes, before Sally’s death in 1999. All’s well that ends ill until George Sharp, the retired Chief Inspector once in charge of the case, turns up in Prague to pluck Umber from his lecturing stint and cart him back to Avebury. Sharp’s received a letter urging him to revisit the case—a letter signed “Junius” that consists entirely of cut-and-paste excerpts from Junius’s letters. The hook is irresistible, and so is the delicious thrill of watching Umber, like many other Goddard heroes (Play to the End, 2006, etc.), get led by the nose by every witness he interviews—the surviving Halls, Sally’s therapist and best friend, a private eye who’s been working the case for over 20 years—till he’s cut loose from Sharp and dropped through a series of trap doors. The sense of urbane paranoia is skillfully maintained through one mind-boggling surprise after another. Only the final revelation is a letdown.
A suavely sturdy suspenser, first published in the UK in 2005, that manages better than most Goddards to lead its well-meaning hero through ever more insidious snares without making him look like a complete fool.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-440-24280-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delta
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir...
Dr. Alex Cross has left Metro DC Homicide for the FBI, but it’s business as usual in this laughably rough-hewn fairy tale of modern-day white slavery.
According to reliable sources, more people are being sold into slavery than ever before, and it all seems to be going down on the FBI’s watch. Atlanta ex-reporter Elizabeth Connolly, who looks just like Claudia Schiffer, is the ninth target over the past two years to be abducted by a husband-and-wife pair who travel the country at the behest of the nefarious Pasha Sorokin, the Wolf of the Red Mafiya. The only clues are those deliberately left behind by the kidnappers, who snatch fashion designer Audrey Meek from the King of Prussia Mall in full view of her children, or patrons like Audrey’s purchaser, who ends up releasing her and killing himself. Who you gonna call? Alex Cross, of course. Even though he still hasn’t finished the Agency’s training course, all the higher-ups he runs into, from hardcases who trust him to lickspittles seething with envy, have obviously read his dossier (Four Blind Mice, 2002, etc.), and they know the new guy is “close to psychic,” a “one-man flying squad” who’s already a legend, “like Clarice Starling in the movies.” It’s lucky that Cross’s reputation precedes him, because his fond creator doesn’t give him much to do here but chase suspects identified by obliging tipsters and worry about his family (Alex Jr.’s mother, alarmed at Cross’s dangerous job, is suing for custody) while the Wolf and his cronies—Sterling, Mr. Potter, the Art Director, Sphinx, and the Marvel—kidnap more dishy women (and the occasional gay man) and kill everybody who gets in their way, and quite a few poor souls who don’t.
As in summer movies, a triple dose of violence conceals the absence of real menace when neither victims nor avengers stir the slightest sympathy.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-60290-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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