A harrowing if entertaining ride. Fans of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series will, beg pardon, eat this up.
More murder, mayhem, and madness, Italian-style.
Dazieri’s Kill the Father (2017) introduced two psychically wounded characters, Dante Torre and Colomba Caselli, who wrestle with various demons while solving extremely nasty crimes. In this follow-up, the opening gambit is a very nasty crime indeed, with a whole train car full of victims—and that car is the first-class compartment of the Milan-to-Rome express, exciting visions of the class struggle. Of one victim, Dazieri writes by way of warming up to the subject, “the officer decided that this was the deadest dead person he’d ever laid eyes on.” Leave it to a book with a lead named Dante to impose degrees of deadness, but whatever the case, suspicion immediately falls on the usual suspects—the Muslims, that is. A few raids on mosques and one exploding head later, Dante divines that maybe the Islamic State group isn’t to blame after all; for her part, the already well-traumatized Colomba is put on leave, giving her and Dante the freedom of the highway. What they discover while trundling back and forth to Germany, Austria, and elsewhere is that the real killer is Giltine, an avenging angel of sorts, a woman engineered to a fine point of psychosis, with the fingerprints of Stasi and KGB all over the scene. “She scares me, CC,” says Dante. He’s almost as dead inside as Giltine, whose name is that of the goddess of death in ancient Lithuanian mythology, but Giltine has a special knack for recruiting people from bad novelists to Norman Bates wannabes to do her dirty work for her, a whole army of darkness. Can Dante and Colomba save the NATO powers from a woman who likes nothing better than to stick syringes full of mescaline and psylocibin into her victims’ eyes? That question is answered with the most carefully crafted of cliffhangers, one that leaves the door wide open for more blood-spilling adventures to come.
A harrowing if entertaining ride. Fans of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series will, beg pardon, eat this up.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7465-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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