The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge...
A third walk on the wild side for Ellis Portal (The Feast of Stephen, 1999, etc.), former judge and former street person, whose police contact, Sgt. Matt West, wants his help mopping up the fallout from the murder of director Charington Simm during the Toronto Film Festival. Simm’s shooting must have been a cunning piece of work, since none of the hundreds of witnesses who saw his car pull up in front of a premiere noticed anything suspicious until Carrie, his daughter and star, saw his body fall to the ground. It’s not the murder he wants Ellis’s help with, Matt insists; it’s Carrie’s disappearance, presumably back into the jungle of street friends and shelters she knew only too well from her days as a runaway. At first Ellis resists. Humbled as he’s been, he has no great desire to return to the streets. But when a meeting that his manipulative old rival John Stoughton-Melville has set up with Ellis’s estranged son Jeffrey goes sour, and a greedy developer seizes his rooming house from under him and his landlady, former girl-gang member Tootie Beets, Ellis, seeing no better options, resigns himself to search for the vanished Carrie and Tootie—and the mysterious “Ferryman” to whom they’re both linked—through a series of nightmare landscapes from the Marble Widow, an uncompleted office building downtown, to his unlamented old stomping ground in the Don River Valley.
The most conventional of Ellis’s three cases, but still heartfelt and often piercing in its portrayal of life on the edge for all the once and future homeless.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-882593-44-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
All the emotional intensity Slaughter’s readers expect, now focused on a diabolical domestic terrorist. Don’t say you...
Pediatrician/medical examiner Sara Linton’s path to marrying Will Trent, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, runs into apocalyptic obstacles only Slaughter could devise.
To begin with, Sara’s mother objects so strenuously to Will that she won’t even utter his name. But her opposition can’t compete with the carnage that erupts when Sara and Will (The Kept Woman, 2016, etc.), hearing the sounds of a bomb near Emory University, rush to the scene and encounter along the way the aftermath of a three-car collision. Stopping to help, they soon smell something amiss, but not soon enough to prevent them from being overpowered and separated by the supposed victims. Will is beaten to the ground; Sara is whisked off in a car whose occupants include Michelle Spivey, a scientist with the Centers for Disease Control who was abducted from under her young daughter’s nose a month ago. Arriving at the mountain encampment of the Invisible Patriot Army, a paramilitary cadre determined to make America white again, Sara is first forced to treat the wounds of the men who kidnapped her and then asked by IPA leader Dash to remain so that she can treat an outbreak of measles that’s swept through the children in the camp, including Dash’s daughter, whose mother is Gwen Novak, the daughter of Martin Novak, whose history of anti-government bank robberies has made him a high-value federal prisoner. As Will schemes to infiltrate the camp disguised as a new recruit, Sara is dismayed to find that no matter what she does, the children she’s tending keep getting sicker and sicker. Even the most ardent fans of Slaughter’s white-hot thrillers (Pieces of Her, 2018, etc.) will be shocked and horror-stricken by the outrage Dash has planned.
All the emotional intensity Slaughter’s readers expect, now focused on a diabolical domestic terrorist. Don’t say you weren’t warned.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285808-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Kelly’s cats are magical, but not magical enough to distinguish them from a clowder of kitty cozies.
Determined to clear a friend in a businessman’s murder, a Minnesota librarian gets invaluable help from her two magical cats, who are there for her as long as the sardines don’t run out.
Kathleen Paulson is psyched when her brother, Ethan, and his band, the Flaming Gerbils, come to stay with her in Mayville Heights, her adopted hometown. Ethan’s excited not only to spend some quality time with his sister, but also to get to know her closest friend, Maggie, who seems as if she could be more than a friend to him. Good vibes abound until Ethan’s newest band mate, temporary lead guitarist Derek Hanson, gets into a tussle with a man at a bar the whole crew is visiting. Though Kathleen doesn’t condone violence, the man in question, businessman Lewis Wallace, seems to have had it coming to him after kicking a veteran’s service dog. Kathleen doesn’t know much about Wallace, and what she hears isn’t good, but rumors that follow the skirmish suggest he’s come to town to turn over a new leaf. After the incident with Derek, Kathleen, a born animal lover, doesn’t find Wallace sympathetic until she stumbles on his dead body. Kathleen’s boyfriend, town detective Marcus Gordon, is fairly certain that Wallace has been murdered, but it’s hard to know who had a motive besides Derek. In an effort to clear the guitarist, Kathleen tries to figure out who else had reason to do Wallace harm. Variously supported by her two magical cats, Owen and Hercules (The Cats Came Back, 2018, etc.), Kathleen uses her research skills and social networks to suss out the truth.
Kelly’s cats are magical, but not magical enough to distinguish them from a clowder of kitty cozies.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-440-00113-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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