Rozan’s best books, from No Colder Place (1997) to Reflecting the Sky (2001), root their complex plots in a strong central...
No sooner has private eye Bill Smith pried his runaway nephew Gary Russell loose from the cops who picked him up for rolling a drunk than Gary’s taken off again, moments after telling Uncle Bill that his father would be cool with whatever it is he’s on his way to do. Unable to follow Gary, Bill tracks him backward to Warrenstown, New Jersey, the town Gary’s father Scott had just returned to after leaving 20 years earlier. High-school football rules in Warrenstown, and when Bill, nosing around Gary’s school friends looking for leads, discovers the body of sophomore Tory Wesley stripped, beaten, and overdosed in the aftermath of a wild party she gave in her absent parents’ house, everybody is studiously uninterested in finding out which local football players may have been involved. But Bill and his partner Lydia Chin, stonewalled at every turn in their search for answers, get onto bigger game when they link Tory’s death to an eerily similar crime 23 years ago: the case of Bethany Victor, who was raped by a misfit kid who killed himself soon after. At least that’s how the story goes. And in rejecting that story, Bill and Lydia head into a dark past that crosses Monday Night Football with Columbine High.
Rozan’s best books, from No Colder Place (1997) to Reflecting the Sky (2001), root their complex plots in a strong central situation. Her masterly take on one of the genre’s classic tropes—the sins of the fathers waiting to bear poisonous fruit for their children—is worthy of that trope’s own spiritual father, Ross Macdonald.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-24555-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The...
Veteran thrillmeister Deaver kicks off a new series about a man who collects rewards for a living.
Don’t call Colter Shaw a private eye, or a freelance investigator, or even a soldier of fortune, though his job includes elements of all three. The son of a cranky survivalist who died years ago amid suspicious circumstances, light-footed Shaw has returned close to his childhood home in the Bay Area in the hope of claiming the $10,000 Frank Mulliner is offering for the return of his daughter, Sophie, a college student who stormed out after the two of them fought over the FOR SALE sign outside his house and hasn’t been seen since. Shaw, who has the cool-headed but irritating habit of calculating the numerical odds on every possibility, thinks there’s a 60 percent chance that Sophie’s dead, “murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe.” Even though he accepts rewards only for rescues, not recoveries, he begins sorting through the scant evidence, quickly gets a hot lead about Sophie’s fate, and just as quickly realizes that Detective Dan Wiley, of the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, should have followed exactly the same clues days ago. (The rapidly shifting relations between Shaw and the law, in fact, are a particular high point here.) The day after Shaw’s search for Sophie comes to a violent end, he’s already, in the time-honored manner of Deaver’s bulldog heroes (The Burial Hour, 2017, etc.), on the trail of a second abduction, that of LGBT activist Henry Thompson. Readers who haven’t skipped the prologue will know that still a third kidnap victim, very pregnant Elizabeth Chabelle, will need to be rescued the following day. Thompson’s grief-stricken partner, Brian Byrd, tells Shaw, “It’s like this guy’s playing some goddamn sick game”—a remark Deaver’s fans will know to give just as much weight as Shaw himself does.
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The results are subpar for this initial installment but more encouraging for the promised series.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53594-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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