by Sara E. Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2019
Johnson’s debut heroine is as hard as the bones she investigates to get a sense of. Her unsatisfying backstory, coupled with...
Cultures collide as a headstrong forensic odontologist from North Carolina investigates dental remains hidden on Maori land in New Zealand.
Even though she’s only visiting the little town of Rotorua to pay her respects at the funeral of a friend, Alexa Glock (“like the gun”) can’t help but stop by the Waiariki Thermal Land of Enchantment to check out the body she hears was found in the mud there. Venturing behind the police line doesn’t endear her to the small-town investigators on the scene, but Alexa knows she brings something special to the case. Her field is forensic odontology, and her expertise in teeth may enable her to identify the remains—at least, that’s the case she makes to the initially standoffish DI Bruce Horne. Reluctant to hire a stranger who’s essentially assigned herself to the case, Bruce agrees to let Alexa join the investigation already underway in his small department because he has no other good options. But Alexa isn’t satisfied with taking orders. Not only does she constantly direct suspicion and critique toward her new colleagues; she does whatever she feels might help, whether or not she runs it by the brass first. In a town like Rotorua, whose largely Maori population shares a culture a tad different from hers, Alexa’s headstrong tactics are more successful in endangering the team than in getting answers. When lab tech Jenny, the team member most sympathetic to Alexa’s strategies, is attacked in the police station, Alexa feels even more justified in poking around among the Maori people and their artifacts, to the consternation of Bruce, who’d evidently hoped he could develop at least a friendship with Alexa, and maybe more.
Johnson’s debut heroine is as hard as the bones she investigates to get a sense of. Her unsatisfying backstory, coupled with a potential romance that fades in and out, makes her hard to root for.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4642-1121-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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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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
BOOK REVIEW
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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