by Sarah R. Shaber ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2016
Louise’s fifth outing (Louise’s Dilemma, 2013, etc.) once again takes the smart and independent heroine into one of the...
An intelligence agent gets more than she bargained for when she’s promoted during the final days of World War II.
Louise Pearlie is hopeful that her new assignment within the OSS will be more exciting than her previous post as a glorified file clerk. She’s now part of Morale Operations, which creates and disseminates black propaganda—disinformation intended to hasten the fall of the Third Reich. She’s hardly settled into her new office when she’s bundled onto a plane, along with her no-nonsense boss, Alice Osborne, and her Texan colleague Merle Ellison, and flown to nearby Fort Meade, site of a newly opened POW camp. They’re to interview German POWs for possible recruitment as double agents, with Merle, a third-generation German-American, as interpreter. Although they find three likely candidates, none of whom shows any love for the Wehrmacht, one of them has a dismaying tendency to escape the camp, if only to enjoy a few hours of pleasure outside the compound. The second one, it seems, could be easily bribed with a pair of cowboy boots like Merle’s, and the third, a seminary student, was conscripted against his religion and his will. But warning signs that frighten the prisoners and the death of one of the possible recruits put the black-ops plan in jeopardy, especially since there may be a connection with two prisoners who disappeared on the voyage to the States. And after Louise asks her secret lover, a Czech nationalist involved in a covert rescue operation, to help investigate the backgrounds of the missing men, both drafted from the same house in the Sudetenland, she and her colleagues realize they’re up against a powerful opponent.
Louise’s fifth outing (Louise’s Dilemma, 2013, etc.) once again takes the smart and independent heroine into one of the lesser-known arenas of the war. Solid characterizations and a faithful re-creation of wartime life more than make up for the leisurely pace.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8552-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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
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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