All talk and no tension. A legal cozy in a great big village.
Siegel trudges his priestly San Francisco attorney Mike Daley (Special Circumstances, 2000, etc.) against evil cinematic types, one of whom has clobbered another to death with an Oscar.
Director Richard “Big Dick” MacArthur had wrapped up the sequel to his hit The Master only days before and had supposedly enjoyed the pre-release screening with his son “Little Richard” MacArthur, his latest wife, Mike Daley’s ex-niece Angelina “Angel” Chavez, and a group of close associates. But the party was a bust. Hours after showing the none-too-successful vehicle for the untalented Angel, Big Dick turned up fatally battered and Angel was discovered parked by the Golden Gate Bridge in the family Jag, coked to the gills, a bloody Oscar in the trunk. Notified of the mess while still in the sheets with his secret lover, the beautiful Judge Leslie Shapiro, Daley springs into action as quickly as a middle-aged former priest and semi-successful attorney can. Things couldn’t be murkier. Besides being auteur of the shaky new movie, MacArthur was a lead investor in the effort to create a film studio in the newly hot district near the Giants’ new ballpark, a project for which money is slipped to politicians after being washed through neighborhood businesses in order to soften the opposition of the usual anti-everythings. The project is starting to look like a loser, and Big Dick’s grouchy fellow investors were the bulk of the party guests on the fatal night, so the about-to-be-shed Angel wasn’t the only one with unloving feelings for MacArthur. Indeed, the sole straight-arrow in attendance prior to the bashing was MacArthur’s lawyer, and he’s gone missing. Freeing Rosie’s niece will take days of interrogation, miles of driving, and much cooperation from Mike’s brother the p.i. and the junior members of the law firm, one of whose sons is about to be called before Judge Shapiro on a drug rap. Busy, busy, busy.
All talk and no tension. A legal cozy in a great big village.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-399-14917-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.
Only a writer of Patterson’s star-wattage could have hoodwinked his publisher into bringing out this unlovely mess, which pits forensic psychologist Alex Cross against two separate serial killers.
It begins with the slaughter of still another of Cross’s professional and romantic partners, FBI agent Betsey Cavalierre, by Cross’s old nemesis, the Mastermind (Roses Are Red, 2000), who instantly phones to taunt his adversary. With still another partner dead, how can Cross go on? But he has to, immediately, because another killer is on the loose—actually, a pair of killers, William and Michael Alexander, teenaged vampires whose murder of two army officers in Golden Gate Park is just a warmup for the carnage to come. As the Mastermind keeps trying to get Cross’s attention by threatening his adorable kids, his grandmother, and everyone else he’s ever known, Patterson, apparently eager to escape the constraints of the low body count in the soapy Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas (p. 694), unleashes the hounds of hell. Under the direction of their dread Sire, the exultant Alexander brothers (“We’re immortal! We’ll never die!”), leave a trail of gory victims in Las Vegas, Savannah, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge before returning to Santa Cruz for a climactic sequence that finally unmasks the ho-hum Sire. The moment the vampire chronicles end, Cross, without missing a beat, turns to that other serial killer, and soon, courtesy of one of his famous profiler’s hunches, has the Mastermind in his sights. Can he hunt down his enemy before the Mastermind exacts a terrible vengeance against somebody else—say, beauteous Jamilla Hughes of San Francisco Homicide—whose death would reduce Cross to babbling despair? The grade-school characterizations of everyone from cops to victims to cackling psychos guarantee that you won’t care a bit.
A real test for Patterson’s huge audience: If they buy this, they’ll buy anything.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-69323-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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