by Sarah Lovett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1998
Forensic evaluator Dr. Sylvia Strange takes time off from diagnosing murderous sociopaths to investigate the case of a little girl who refuses to talk. Of course, dealing with the girl she comes to know as Serena isn't such a change of pace after all, even though Sylvia would never know that from the phone call that jerks her awake one night. The child who piloted an auto away from the scene of a brutal execution, and into the path of an oncoming train, obviously isn't mute because of an illness or physiological condition; there's some psychological trauma behind her refusal to speak. The exact reason Serena won't talk is a mystery, but there's no mystery about the horrific life she's been forced to lead lately, bereft of her parents (whoever they are) and her murdered protector, and stalked by Lorenzo Santos Portillo, a maniacally determined assassin who shrugs off protective custody, security guards, and Sylvia's attack dog and just keeps on coming. As Sylvia and her fiancÇ, New Mexico State cop Matt England, puzzle over the pieces of Serena's background—and her relation to death row inmate Cash Wheeler and well-heeled Noelle Harding—Renzo keeps switching gears but not missions, preparing to execute Serena as she sleeps in Sylvia's spare room or in the hospital where she's been stashed. It's ghoulish fun watching this present-day Terminator get into position over and over without delivering the knockout blow, but the child-in-jeopardy genre, though it focuses Lovett's energetic portraits of evil better than the sprawling Dangerous Attachments (1995) and Acquired Motives (1996), also gives her patient hit-man, fueled on synthetic heroin yet mysteriously never out of control, an almost soothingly ritualistic quality. This guy is so unstoppable you can't believe he's really going to kill the kiddie before Sylvia can make her diagnosis. Less wildly over the top, but also less distinctive, than Lovett's striking first two. Fans of endangered children will probably do better sticking with Abigail Padgett.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-43561-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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by Sarah Lovett
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
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by J.A. Jance
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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
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