Throughout, there’s a scattering of good white-knuckle moments, but with Pottinger, ever the overplotter (A Slow Burning,...
Chutzpah: a no-good Nazi offing a nice Jewish boy, then swiping his identity for over half a century.
Adalwolf is the name that Nazi-hunter Melissa Gale knows him by, the monster she’s been chasing for five fruitless years. He frustrates and embitters her. Nor does he do her career a lot of good. Early in the story, an Adalwolf misadventure leads to Melissa’s suspension from a high-level job in the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations. Additional dismal things she knows about Adalwolf: he’s cunning, arrogant, vindictive, devilishly smart, and elusive as hell. Most important, she knows that he was the foster son of Dr. Josef Mengeles, infamous for the “procedures” he performed on Jewish inmates of Auschwitz before sending them on to Crematorium V. As a teenaged monster of 16, Adalwolf was the diabolical doctor’s eager surgical assistant. What Melissa doesn’t know about Adalwolf—though the reader does—is that for 56 years he’s been masquerading as Professor Ben Ben-Levi, world-class fertility specialist and father-figure/mentor to Melissa, who’s been trying desperately to get pregnant. She adores gentle Ben-Levi, trusts him, depends on him—and then is shockingly betrayed by him at a time when she could hardly have been more vulnerable. But for Adalwolf, the time is propitious indeed, because, with her unwitting help, his wicked secret agenda can at last be activated. No less virulent than he was at Auschwitz, he plans to launch a Jewish plague: a killer virus engineered to be selective—with Melissa’s baby, like Rosemary’s, to be the incubator of unspeakable evil. Aroused, Melissa goes on the attack: mother versus monster, a vengeful, fire-breathing mother ready, willing, and able to play by monster rules.
Throughout, there’s a scattering of good white-knuckle moments, but with Pottinger, ever the overplotter (A Slow Burning, 2000, etc.), more continues to be less.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-27676-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Although it’s as shallow as the grave an inconvenient body is buried in, this thriller does offer some nastily entertaining...
A marital thriller aspiring to the Gone Girl model offers some dark surprises.
Scott is a pen name for two collaborators, one a publishing professional, the other a screenwriter, and they seem to have done their homework. The book, already optioned for a TV series, is squarely aimed at a slot in the growing list of he-said, she-said mysteries. The novel focuses on spouses Paul and Rebecca, whose almost two-decade-long marriage flounders after his contracting business fails. She’s thriving as a pharmaceutical sales rep—a convenient job for a woman with Rebecca’s raging opioid addiction. They are not a likable pair. Both are inveterate liars, Paul about his adultery, Rebecca about her drug abuse. They swing wildly between intricate, amoral scheming and profound naiveté—at several points, the only thing more incredible than one character’s lies is that the other believes them so readily. Paul’s affair with an unhappy neighbor goes sideways about the same time Rebecca’s boss faces legal problems and the disappearance of his beautiful wife, whom Rebecca detests. Someone ends up dead, of course, and Paul and Rebecca must dispose of a body. But when a hidden corpse is found, it’s not the one they buried. The book has multiple first-person narrators and a plot that weaves strands through various timelines; through its middle portion it bogs down under the weight of all that but tightens up for a fast-paced final third that accelerates past some less than believable elements.
Although it’s as shallow as the grave an inconvenient body is buried in, this thriller does offer some nastily entertaining twists.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4452-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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