by Sheri Holman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1997
In an unusual, probing debut, 15th-century Palestine is the destination for a group of German pilgrims, who arrive gratefully in the Holy Land after a perilous sea voyage, only to lose much of what they hold most dear. Fishing the corpse of a fellow pilgrim from a harbor in Crete to give him a Christian burial, Friar Felix Fabri and his patron Lord Tucher escort the dead man to a church containing a relic of the Friar's heavenly bride, the martyr Saint Katherine—and find it stolen. So it goes across the Mediterranean: Whenever they reach a location supposed to possess relics of Katherine, Felix learns that they've just been filched. A woman named Arsinoâ, who joins the pilgrims on board ship, begins to seem a likely suspect: She is believed to be the ``Tongue of Saint Katherine,'' through whom the saint speaks to those on earth. The suspect's odd behavior takes an even stranger twist when she assumes her Greek husband's identity after his death en route. Other deaths follow when the Holy Land is reached, leaving the Friar torn: Is Arsinoâ really what she thinks she is, or is she dangerously delusional, as her pursuing brother Niccolo claims. By misleading her brother, Felix helps her to get a head start on a trek across the desert to Mount Sinai, home of Katherine's shrine, then learns that she may be bent on destroying what he has crossed the world to see. The final stages of the journey bring privation, betrayal, and death to most of his fellow travelers, including his patron and Arsinoâ. Having barely survived himself, the friar is left a wiser man, to contemplate his harrowing experience with what remains of his faith. Light humor and deep tragedy coexist uneasily here, with the latter ultimately triumphant, but the unevenness doesn't change the fact that this is a rich, surprisingly compelling tale of faith and spiritual transformation. (First printing of 35,000)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87113-669-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
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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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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