Cook’s spot in the pantheon of page-turning, bestselling thriller authors who write like Siri is secure.
Cutting-edge DNA database techniques are put to work by a foulmouthed troublemaker in the office of New York City’s chief medical examiner.
Medical thriller pioneer Cook (Pandemic, 2018, etc.) kicked off his Laurie Montgomery/Jack Stapleton series in 1992 with Blindsight. By now—the current book is the 12th in the series—the two autopsy mavens are married and she is New York’s chief medical examiner. They are raising one kid with autism, another with potential ADHD, and Laurie herself may have to have a double mastectomy. But forget all that, because nobody is reading these books for the character development (“It was hopelessly clear to her that she would most likely never get over her aversion to speaking in front of groups, just like she was likely never to get over her fear of authority figures thanks to her emotionally distant and domineering father”) or for the writing (“She could see that sun had cleared the horizon, again bathing that water tower on the neighboring building in golden light. To Laurie it seemed symbolic of having come to a decision”). See, he writes just like a real doctor. On the other hand, the plot is gangbusters. The death of a 10-weeks-pregnant social worker looks like an opioid overdose, but since the woman was not a drug user and there’s no daddy on the scene, something seems a little off. Particularly to the brilliant, misanthropic, sociopathically rude and self-important Dr. Aria Nichols, who’s been sent over from NYU for her pathology residency. The minute she sees the fetus in the uterus they’re dissecting she has an insight. “This wasn’t a sperm donor pregnancy. Some bastard had his way with this woman and then abandons her. I can just feel it. Hell, he might have even supplied the drugs or been the reason she decided to take them.” The technique she employs to track down that sperm donor is similar to that used in the real-life Golden State Killer case and even more like the method memoirist Dani Shapiro used to find her real father, as described in Inheritance.
Cook’s spot in the pantheon of page-turning, bestselling thriller authors who write like Siri is secure.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-54215-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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