by Stuart Woods & Parnell Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018
Reliable, pleasantly overplotted, low-impact thrills make this a perfect airplane read the next time you’re jetting to La-La...
Teddy Fay, the ex–CIA op and ex-assassin now working as a producer and stuntman at Centurion Pictures (Smooth Operator, 2016), goes up against two different tribes bent on making trouble for the studio where he’s found a home.
Before she married future Centurion head Ben Bacchetti, Tessa Tweed was an undergraduate at Oxford whose boyfriend Nigel Hightower III made a sex tape of them without telling her. Now someone’s gotten a hold of the tape and is determined to bend her to their will. The blackmailers, Star Pictures head Mason Kimble, still smarting over the rejection of one of his B-movie projects by Centurion director Peter Barrington, and his one-time frat brother Gerard Cardigan, plan to take control of Centurion by forcing Tessa, who owns a crucial block of shares, to vote in favor of their hostile takeover. And they’re not the only bad hombres with mergers on their mind. Sammy Candelosi, who’s just purchased a Las Vegas casino next door to Pete Genaro’s New Desert Inn, is convinced Genaro’s operation would be more profitable under his own management, and his less-than-legal maneuverings eventually put Teddy, now calling himself Billy Barnett so that he won’t be troubled by people who once knew him as Billy Burnett, in his sights as well. The complication that renders all these nefarious plots utterly unthreatening is that neither the murderous blackmailers nor the mobbed-up Vegas casino owner nor Slythe, his knife-wielding bodyguard, has any idea what an adversary they’re up against in Teddy, whose loyalty to Centurion is matched only by his uncanny skill at self-preservation.
Reliable, pleasantly overplotted, low-impact thrills make this a perfect airplane read the next time you’re jetting to La-La Land.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1859-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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 Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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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
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