by Sam Hawken ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2017
While action’s fine when it’s plentiful, more attention to character development could have made Camaro more relatable and...
Hawken continues the exploits of Camaro Espinoza, a tough female former Army medic, in this shoot-'em-up, action-packed installment set in the sleepy communities that ring Los Angeles.
Camaro’s younger sister, Annabel, has finally broken free of her abusive boyfriend, Jake Collier, but she can’t get him to leave. She talks her sister into coming to her aid, but while Camaro’s straightening him out, Jake’s big brother, Lukas, is busy murdering the bail bondsman who tried to take him into custody in Denver. Meanwhile, Camaro faces off with Jake at his job in a local lumberyard and things don’t go down well for him. As Lukas works his way closer to California to finalize a scheme with his brother, he drags behind him a trail of people set on revenge, including Yates, the father of the bail bondsman he killed, and Way, a deputy U.S. marshal whose partner he murdered. As Camaro seeks to protect her sister, Way and Yates find themselves on opposite sides of Camaro’s cooperation even though all three of them seek the same resolution. Plenty of guns and fisticuffs, as well as a twisty trail to follow, fill this action enthusiast’s tale. And Hawken certainly knows how to keep the action going: Camaro goes from scrape to scrape with barely enough time to treat her own wounds and regroup before the next ambush or assault. But while Hawken writes excellent action/adventure, where he falls down is in bringing his characters to life. Camaro is basically a man with breasts: there's nothing about her that feels female (although her sister is as domestic as Betty Crocker). The bad guys—Lukas the killer and Way the deputy U.S. marshal—are so deranged they devolve into caricatures. Only Yates, the old man whose son has died, resonates as a human being.
While action’s fine when it’s plentiful, more attention to character development could have made Camaro more relatable and provided both villains with some badly needed dimension.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-29926-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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by Sam Hawken
by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
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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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
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by J.A. Jance
by Patricia Cornwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2007
Proceed at your own risk.
Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”
Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.
Proceed at your own risk.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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