Apart from all the big names tossed in to cow Casselli, Woods mostly soft-pedals the usual gratuitous inflation and...
A former New York Mafioso who’s fled home to Italy kidnaps the latest inamorata of the redoubtable Stone Barrington (Hot Pursuit, 2015, etc.). Big mistake.
Stone’s flown the Atlantic at an hour’s notice, flirting en route with painter Hedy Kiesler, to vote in favor of opening a new Arrington Hotel in Rome. No sooner have the contracts been signed than trouble erupts. The unfinished hotel already standing abandoned on the site is torched; Stone’s borrowed car is stolen and set alight as well; he gets several increasingly overt threats encouraging him to go home and forget the deal; and it’s clear that they’re coming from Leonardo Casselli, the patriarchal mobster who just hates being called Leo. Packing Hedy off from his hotel bed in Rome to another bed in Paris, Stone stays just long enough to read the riot act in response to Casselli’s suave luncheon offer of extortionate “protection,” threatening him with the extensive resources of Massimo Bertelli’s Italian Anti-Mafia Investigative Department; Stone’s unfathomably wealthy business partner Marcel duBois; his buddy Mike Freeman’s company, Strategic Services; his even closer buddy Commissioner Dino Bacchetti’s New York Police Department; and President Katharine Rule Lee, another close personal friend. Then he hastens back to Rome, leaving Hedy in his Paris house, from which she’s promptly abducted. Stone soon finds out that Casselli’s holding Hedy in an impregnable house on the Amalfi coast; Casselli soon finds out that Stone wasn’t kidding about all those connections.
Apart from all the big names tossed in to cow Casselli, Woods mostly soft-pedals the usual gratuitous inflation and extraneous subplots, keeping things simple, straightforward, and pleasantly predictable.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17467-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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