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DEAD IN THE WATER

Woods bounces back from the doldrums of his last few formula thrillers in this tidy did-she-do-it puzzler, nicely stirred by Caribbean breezes. When the 45-foot yacht Expansive puts into the island paradise of St. Marks, the only thing missing is the skipper, mystery novelist Paul Manning, who, his wife tearfully tells the authorities, suffered a fatal heart attack while she watched helplessly from high atop a mast, and had to be buried at sea. The story's good enough for the coroner's inquest, but not for Sir Winston Sutherland, the ambitious Minister of Justice, who thinks a high-profile conviction might be just the thing to vault him into the aging Prime Minister's post. Luckily for Allison, she has just the credentials (blond hair, killer bod, boundless sexual stamina) to secure herself the premier legal representation on St. Marks: vacationing New York lawyer Stone Barrington (Dirt, 1996, etc.), whose appetite for adventure, etc., has been whetted by the unexpected absence of his live-in girlfriend Arrington Carter. It's a case that suits Woods's talent for streamlined, unnuanced narrative down to the shoreline. With no witnesses but Allison—now enjoying a cool $12 million payoff from Paul's insurance—and virtually no physical evidence showing how (or even whether) Paul met his death, Stone doesn't have to bother arguing the facts; all he has to do is orchestrate a massive p.r. campaign designed to impress on the government what a disaster a conviction would be for St. Marks's crucial tourist industry— while trying to find some wiggle room in the island's draconian trial law, which pretty much assumes that the accused is guilty and the real crime would be keeping the jury past dinnertime. Trying to make this neat, utterly unsurprising, tale— Woods's best since L.A. Times (1993)—last more than one sitting would be like staying up all night nursing a Godiva truffle. (Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection; $300,000 ad/promo)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-06-018368-3

Page Count: 336

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997

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THE A LIST

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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BOOK OF THE DEAD

Proceed at your own risk.

Pioneering pathologist Kay Scarpetta (Trace, 2004, etc.) goes up against a wraithlike killer whose self-appointed mission is to “relieve others of their suffering.”

Practice, practice, practice. If only 16-year-old South Carolina tennis phenom Drew Martin had stuck to the court instead of going off to Rome to party, her tortured corpse wouldn’t be baffling the Italian authorities, headed inexplicably by medico legale Capt. Ottorino Poma, and the International Investigative Response team, which includes both Scarpetta and her lover, forensic psychologist Benton Wesley. But the young woman’s murder and the gruesome forensic riddles it poses are something of a sideshow to the main event: the obligatory maundering of the continuing cast. Wesley still won’t leave Boston for the woman he tepidly insists he loves. Scarpetta’s niece, computer whiz Lucy Farinelli, continues to be jealously protective of her aunt. Scarpetta’s investigator, Pete Marino, is so besotted by the trailer-trash pickup who’s pushing his buttons that he does some terrible things. And Scarpetta herself is threatened by every misfit in the known universe, from a disgruntled mortician to oracular TV shrink Marilyn Self. Cornwell’s trademark forensics have long since been matched by Karin Slaughter and CSI. What’s most distinctive about this venerable franchise is the kitchen-sink plotting; the soap-opera melodrama that prevents any given volume from coming to a satisfying end; and the emphasis on titanic battles between Scarpetta and a series of Antichrists.

Proceed at your own risk.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-399-15393-8

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

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