by Sam Brandon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017
A bracing suspense tale with strong characters.
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In this thriller set in California, a hunky hero and a lovely heroine deal with some bad guys—but things are truly not what they seem.
Christian Sterling—first in his class at Stanford Law—is already a legend and a celebrity, having never lost a case, first as a prosecutor and now as a defense attorney. He is known, in fact, as the “Svengali of the Courtroom.” But when young Kelly Wilde, accused of killing her billionaire parents, begs him to defend her, he takes the case with strict conditions. Kelly is a hot mess, deep into drugs and booze (and herself), so until the trial, she has to stay with him at his ranch in Big Sur and clean up her act. Christian is not only a Svengali, but also clearly a Pygmalion: After three months, Kelly is sober and vibrantly happy—and the two are falling in love. Kelly’s case looks hopeless, but this is the famous Christian Sterling. She is in fact cleared, although not by the jury. The trial, while dramatic enough, is hardly the end of the story. To say more will get readers into spoiler territory. Brandon is certainly experienced in this genre. He offers readers Christian’s romantic/tragic backstory and his beautiful ranch with the loyal Mexican retainers Miguel and Rosario Gomez. The transformation of Kelly from spoiled and angry rich kid to gorgeous, confident young woman is deftly handled. The audience will like both leads, Pygmalion and his Galatea, and the clever setup. As to whodunit, that reveal is also expertly presented as the clues fall into place and extra bodies are discovered. (Mike Bristol, a cynical San Francisco Police Department cop, figures prominently here.) The gripping story will keep readers guessing until the end. In fact, the very last sentence is a zinger. The audience will either cheer or boo the final twists. But that’s part of the fun.
A bracing suspense tale with strong characters.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-978245-52-5
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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