Nonetheless: a shrewdly judged female actioner, tailor-made for audiences who would’ve loved Deliverance if it hadn’t been...
An Atlanta prosecutor, revisiting the area where her Cherokee mother was slain 12 years earlier, steps off the edge of the civilized universe into a world of trouble.
After turning her sixth indictment into her sixth conviction, rookie A.D.A. Mary Crow is ready to celebrate. And it’s time as well that she faced the ghosts back in Little Jump Off, North Carolina, by making a pilgrimage to her mother’s grave and the convenience store where she was robbed, raped, and murdered. Accompanied by her lawyer friends Alexandra McCrimmin and Joan Marchetti, she plans a weekend of physically strenuous but spiritually tonic camping in Nantahala National Forest. But the women aren’t alone in the forest primeval. Mitchell Whitman, brother of the latest convict Mary helped put away, has armed himself to the teeth and decided to do some camping too. And that’s not all. To while away the hours before Mitch can overtake the trio, debut novelist Bissell supplies a crackpot trapper whose mastery of woodlore, coupled with his delusive certainty that Alex is really Trudy, the dead sister who haunts him even more insistently than Mary’s mother haunts her, makes him every bit as dangerous as that city slicker Mitch. After a conscientious, laborious start, Bissell tightens the screws slowly and expertly, providing some spectacular, often threatening, mountain scenery along the way. Credibility and suspense are both strained, though, by the multiplication of villains who have to wait in line for a crack at their potential victims, especially when most of the victims don’t even know the predators exist, and the predators don’t know about each other either. And a nagging loose end at the fadeout will leave plenty of readers piqued.
Nonetheless: a shrewdly judged female actioner, tailor-made for audiences who would’ve loved Deliverance if it hadn’t been for all the guy stuff.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-553-80128-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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