The pasteboard characters don’t torpedo Frey’s labyrinthine plot, but the clunky writing does. Better wait for the...
A moneyed, dysfunctional, power-mad American family is pitted against an even direr plot to peek into the darkest recesses of every American closet.
Apart from patriarchal Jimmy Lee Hancock, the head of the family is Connecticut governor and presidential hopeful Paul Hancock. Not far behind is his brother Teddy, CEO of Warfield Capital, the family’s investment fund. But the real brains and guts are supplied by their hard-drinking brother Bolling, who’s had Paul’s number ever since he buried a dead prostitute for him years ago, and knows Teddy would run Warfield into the ground if Bo ever took his hand off the tiller. With a crew of siblings like this—there’s also a pair of ill-assorted sisters—you can expect some pleasantly shivery bumps along the road to megabucks and the White House, and for a while Frey (The Insider, 1999, etc.) canters along nonchalantly as if he were rewriting the Kennedy saga in the manner of the late Mario Puzo, right down to the dialogue. (“Am I worthy of your love?” Bo wonders of his loyal, beloved, barely-there wife Meg.) At length, though, he reveals a deep-dyed snake—a monstrous, murderous covert intelligence-gathering operation (think Big, Big Brother) code-named RANSACK—that’s made its way into the Hancock bosom, setting brother against brother and leaving a trail of professionally dispatched corpses in its wake. Can Bo, first branded a black sheep and banished to Montana, then finding his poisoned friends-and-relations closing ranks against him on his return, save the Hancocks and the nation from a fate they richly deserve?
The pasteboard characters don’t torpedo Frey’s labyrinthine plot, but the clunky writing does. Better wait for the inevitable TV movie, where you can enjoy the spectacle of up-and-coming performers trying to sell zingers like “He fools everyone with his charm, but he’s evil.”Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-42829-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
Hoag finishes her crossover from sexy soft-cover romance to psychosexual thriller with this tale of tough Cajun loners looking for love in unlikely places. Heroine Annie Broussard is a deputy with the sheriff's office in Partout Parish in southern Louisiana. An orphan who's working hard to make detective, she's also devoted to getting rid of the sexual predators who victimize women. But just as her career seems to be looking up, Annie breaks an unwritten police law: She arrests a fellow officer, Nick Fourcade, when she finds him beating up a murder suspect. Annie should have let Fourcade kill him, say both her colleagues and the bayou parish citizens. After all, the suspect, Marcus Renard, had supposedly stalked Pam Bichon, a single mother. He'd driven stakes through her hands, raped her, killed her, eviscerated her, then left her wearing only a feathered Mardi Gras mask in a deserted cottage on Pony Bayou. Why not kill him? Switching his obsession from Pam to Annie, he maintains that he's innocent and begs Annie to help him. Working with Fourcade, who's suspended but still obsessed with the case, she seeks evidence to put the troubled Marcus legally behind bars. Meanwhile, someone's raping Louisiana women, and Marcus is too injured to be the perp. Is it Annie's lazy, mean-spirited colleague Stokes? Or Pam's husband, involved with a New Orleans racketeer from Fourcade's past? As Mardi Gras approaches, Annie, a cute kid who does 50 chin-ups a day and has an addiction to candy bars, wrestles with Fourcade's dangerous sexuality—fortunately a losing battle—and with the evil presence of deranged male predators that haunts so many recent suspense novels. Hoag (Guilty as Sin, 1996, etc.) is always a good gritty read, but this time a lack of sustained emotional tension makes the novel a long ride on soft tires.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-09960-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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