An entertaining procedural that skillfully blends police work and personal relationships.
Detectives in two U.S. states pursue a serial killer who sees himself as a savior of domestically abused children in this thriller.
Detroit resident Rita Rose has good reason to avoid a romantic relationship. Her ex-fiance, Dr. Zeke Fazul, after committing vehicular homicide, tried to frame Rita by putting her unconscious body behind the wheel. Cleared of official charges, she’s now slowly recovering, thanks in part to her best friend, Detective Jacqueline McSween. Jaq helps Rita find a job as a medical examiner’s assistant and encourages her friend to date again. Soon, Rita meets an airline pilot, Nick Archer, and the two hit it off. Unfortunately, readers know the relationship is already doomed as Nick is a murderer. With access to children’s letters to Santa, Nick zeros in on the kids who write about some form of abuse. He targets individuals responsible for tormenting loved ones, and his M.O.—victims left with broken necks and handmade rosaries—quickly alerts Jaq and her partner, David Maxwell, to a serial killer in the area. At the same time, Nick’s flights frequently take him to Sarasota, Florida, where he tracks down other abusers. The investigating Sarasota detectives, Abel Mendoza and Ronald “Rabbit” Randall, likewise spot similarities among the murders. The two detective teams aren’t initially aware of each other. Meanwhile, an exuberant Rita grows closer to Nick. But his unsavory side gradually emerges, as he’s controlling and prone to reciting biblical passages at odd times. With luck, Rita will uncover more about Nick before it’s too late. Aquilina (Feel No Evil, 2003), a Michigan circuit court judge, aptly establishes her story as a procedural. For example, the detectives’ periodic discussions at crime scenes or the medical examiner’s table ultimately help them form a profile of the killer. The author also uses these procedural elements for consistent character development. Jaq and David, for example, are hiding an intimate relationship that violates department policy while ME Dr. Towers is a mentor and father figure to Rita. Accordingly, Aquilina’s prose is a solid fusion of police/medical jargon and banter among co-workers and friends. But even with meticulous murder investigations, the ongoing cases aren’t always enlightening. Jaq has a running theory that the killer is inspired by the 10 plagues of Egypt (for example, killing a firstborn or putting lice on a victim). But this ultimately provides no further insights, as the premise involves some earlier murders and suggests ritualistic and religious aspects that the handmade rosaries have already implied. Regardless, Nick and Rita prove to be intriguing characters on their own as well as together. Though Nick is offing bad people (whom not all family members are sad to see go), he’s unmistakably disturbed. Knowing he’s a killer makes his scenes with Rita relentlessly tense, especially when his domineering manner crops up. Rita’s decision to stay with Nick, despite her increasing wariness, is believable: her behavior is akin to that of a battered woman. Indeed, Nick’s treatment of her is psychological abuse. Notwithstanding readers’ knowledge of the killer’s identity, there’s an effective twist near the end.
An entertaining procedural that skillfully blends police work and personal relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73369-640-1
Page Count: 455
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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