by Stuart Woods ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2014
The political convention as family reunion, with lots of drama, no sustained plot and all the regulars acting pretty much as...
First lady Katharine Rule Lee’s quest for the Democratic nomination to succeed her husband unleashes all sorts of mostly unrelated complications for the mostly familiar cast.
When you’re tight with someone like New York attorney Stone Barrington (Carnal Curiosity, 2014, etc.), you’re likely to brush up against lots of interesting people. Same thing when you share the president’s bed. And her tenure as CIA director has made Kate enemies of her own. So it’s no surprise that senators from New Mexico and Virginia are ready to fight her tooth and nail for the nomination and not much bigger a surprise when Secret Service agent Mervin Beam, head of the Los Angeles office, shows Stone a death threat against her he’s received. Stone, in LA to keep Kate’s deputy campaign manager, Ann Keaton, company during the convention, is on hand when his son, Peter, the rising star of Centurion Studios, signs Susannah Wilde for a pivotal character role in his new movie, angering Charlene Joiner, the president’s ex-lover, who thought she had the part sewn up. Susannah’s husband, Ed Eagle, a New Mexico delegate to the convention, is worried once again that his ex-wife, Barbara, now married to a London auto dealer, is gunning for him, and once again he’s right. If Barbara can’t kill Ed by hiring an Army veteran to blow up his private jet, she’s prepared to launch a smear campaign that will accuse him of repeatedly plotting to kill her. And of course disaffected ex–CIA op Teddy Fay, now reborn as Peter’s associate producer, Billy Burnett, is keeping an eye on Barbara just in case the wheels of justice don’t grind fine enough.
The political convention as family reunion, with lots of drama, no sustained plot and all the regulars acting pretty much as you’d expect.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16911-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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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by Catherine Coulter ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 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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