Brains beat brawn in this engrossing yarn, and a mind without a memory makes Toyne's hero a hard character to—well, to...
Second book in the Solomon Creed series (The Searcher, 2015), this imaginative thriller takes root in the Holocaust and sprouts in modern-day France.
Josef Engel bleeds to death from a Star of David carved into his chest, and the killer uses Engel’s blood to write “Finishing what was begun” in German on a wall. Engel had been one of four tailors in Die Schneider Lager—The Tailor’s Camp—in a concentration camp. He “should have died in the camp” 70 years ago, says his killer, one of the men searching for Die Anderen—The Others, the survivors, who for a mysterious reason must all be killed. Enter Solomon Creed, a strange and pigment-free “pale man” whom the police suspect in the murder. He is a “high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic” with an “off the charts” IQ, a phenomenal “know-it-all mind,” and no idea who he really is—his only clue is the label inside his perfectly fitting jacket saying it was “made to treasure for Mr. Solomon Creed.” He can't remember that it came from tailors grateful that he had rescued them from a concentration camp, including Josef Engel. That’s because his psychiatrist, Dr. Cezar Magellan of the Institute of Criminal Psychology, has implanted a device in his shoulder to remove toxic memories. Creed goes looking for the man who made his jacket, but he arrives too late. Meanwhile, Engel's granddaughter, Marie-Claude, lives with her superhero-loving 7-year-old son, Léo, and apart from her abusive criminal ex-husband, Jean Baptiste. Creed protects them and finds a commonality with Léo: they both have forms of synesthesia. Creed can smell danger, while Léo sees emotions as colors in the same way Engel did. To Léo, “Nice people have bright colors,” and bad people don’t. Why Solomon Creed can return 70 years after the Holocaust is a mystery that won’t bother readers at all. He just does, and the bad guys will have to deal with it.
Brains beat brawn in this engrossing yarn, and a mind without a memory makes Toyne's hero a hard character to—well, to forget.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-232975-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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