A busy, often histrionic drama with an awkwardly rendered religious message.
Finding both joy and sorrow in a complicated love triangle, three lifelong friends raise a child only to lose him years later to an unexpected killer in Jeffrey’s (Gems in the Cracks, 2008) latest novel.
Following the sudden murder of his father, a young John Richards finds soul mates in friends Gail and Tania, who help him cope with his loss. John’s mother calls them the “strays” and grows to consider the girls part of her family. But John—in love with both—must ultimately choose one over the other. In the end, he marries Gail. Years later, however, pained by her friend’s multiple miscarriages, Tania offers to be the surrogate mother for their child. “It was the solution, the only solution, and everyone was too happy and excited, too inebriated with hope, to entertain any notion of ulterior consequences.” As one might expect, old feelings and attractions emerge as John watches Tania carry his baby. A son is born, and Gail and John set out to raise a family. Sean, in some ways the child of all three of them, grows up healthy and happy, and Tania finds love with a successful surgeon. But after Sean goes missing before his big soccer game, he’s found dead, and his parents are in shock: “John lay on his back, looked at the ceiling with hope….Gail looked at the ceiling and saw no hope, just a darkness, a void that reflected the void and emptiness in her soul.” The novel builds tension by following the three confused and heartbroken characters, each of them struggling to understand their faith and their friendship. “God, Lady? God?” Sean’s killer asks Gail from his jail cell. “What God would let three innocent kids die?” Unfortunately, the Christian message is expressed via contrived spiritual metaphors and hackneyed existential dilemmas. For example, “John was still enwrapped in fancy…when the lights came on and it seemed like the morning of creation, not in brightness, but in splendour, as only the Master might have done it.” Spiritual overtones aside, the author paints a compelling—if sometimes melodramatic—picture of three humans coping with some of the worst tragedies life can offer.
A busy, often histrionic drama with an awkwardly rendered religious message.Pub Date: March 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1492146827
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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