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BEHEAD ME

A CLIFF KNOWLES MYSTERY

From the The Cliff Knowles Mysteries series , Vol. 6

An often engaging mystery from an author who will hopefully provide further series installments.

A case of corporate espionage becomes violent in a new mystery from Atkinson (Cached Out, 2015, etc.) featuring recurring hero Cliff Knowles, a smart, scrappy FBI agent.

Cliff has traded in his badge for a quieter position as a licensed private investigator, and he hopes to settle down to a relatively normal life in California with his beloved wife, Ellen Kennedy, still an active FBI agent, and their infant son. He’s soon contacted by Silicon Valley company Advanced Photolithics, or APL which makes equipment for computer chip manufacturers. Business has been bad lately, and API executives fear that someone has stolen their proprietary drawings and is now undercutting their prices for replacement parts. But a murder may also be in the mix, as Cliff discovers that an employee for Belcher Industries, an API vendor in rural Utah, might have had information that led to his mysterious death. Cliff investigates in Utah with the help of his old friend, retired agent Tim Rothman, and soon winds up in danger himself. Ellen and her partner also get involved in the case; a side plot has Ellen performing a background check on a woman seeking to get a pardon for a decades-old crime, and it turns out that the woman had once attacked Cliff in a drunken rage. This second storyline is well-written but doesn’t fit in with the rest of the tale, even on a thematic level. Later, in a thrilling car chase, Cliff and Ellen go after one of the book’s most dangerous villains; however, Atkinson barely describes another important baddie, despite the fact that the person is the ringleader of the entire affair. The story as a whole is fast-moving and snappily plotted, and it includes some especially tense sequences, such as when Cliff evades a killer in the scorching Nevada desert. Atkinson deserves credit for taking a dry premise for a mystery—the stolen goods are, after all, drawings of gaskets and valves—and creating an enjoyable story.

An often engaging mystery from an author who will hopefully provide further series installments.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: 978-1-5300-3940-1

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2016

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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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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THE WINNER

Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)

Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997

ISBN: 0-446-52259-7

Page Count: 528

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997

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