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UNBOUND

As uncertain in its pacing and structure as a Road Runner cartoon—you just never know who’ll be abruptly discarded and...

Invincible New York attorney Stone Barrington (Quick & Dirty, 2017, etc.) is shoved to the sidelines by even more formidable ex–CIA agent Teddy Fay, now operating under the names Billy Barnett when he’s producing films for Centurion Studios and Ted Shirley when he’s seeking full-throated revenge.

Whatever impulses toward social compliance may have survived Teddy’s checkered earlier adventures (Smooth Operator, with Parnell Hall, 2017, etc.) are instantly killed off when he’s widowed by the wife of dislikable Hollywood producer Dax Baxter, who runs over Teddy’s own wife after a “three-cosmo lunch” and then retreats into a private clinic to escape prosecution. Asking his boss, Stone’s son Peter, for a leave of absence, Teddy drives to Santa Fe, where, as Ted Shirley, he gets himself hired on Baxter’s latest shoot. Sensing danger, Baxter hires Russian assassin Dimitri Kasov to neutralize Teddy, but he’s no more successful than Baxter’s own bodyguards were. When Teddy, unmasked but undimmed in his resolve, heads back to Los Angeles with Sally Ryder, whom he’s picked up at the shoot, in tow, Baxter redoubles his efforts to have him killed. Despite Teddy’s well-honed survival skills, all might be lost if it weren’t for the timely intervention of Sgt. Carlos Rivera, who works the auto theft detail for the Beverly Hills PD. Carlos gets into the middle of this battle royal in a most unlikely way, but once he’s established himself firmly there, fans will recognize that there’s no hope for Baxter or anyone he hires in the high-fatality rounds that follow.

As uncertain in its pacing and structure as a Road Runner cartoon—you just never know who’ll be abruptly discarded and who’ll turn out to matter in the Woods world—and equally formulaic in the conduct of individual episodes and the final outcome.

Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7352-1717-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017

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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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PRETTY GIRLS

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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