A cautionary tale of one man’s overreaching for excitement and the deadly consequences.
Shannon debuts with a character-driven murder mystery set in the late 1960s.
By all appearances, Jack Bishop has everything a man could want. Handsome, fit, and successful, he works at Laughton Aeronautics, a major corporation that produces aircraft parts. Outside of his career, Jack has a beautiful wife, Joanna, and two children, but he feels restless nonetheless. The charm seems to have left his marriage, and he and Joanna are locked in an endless loop of quiet indifference. When Jack is asked to find a new assistant for a major project at work, he immediately falls for Lora Denning, the daughter of a longtime manager in his office whose beauty and seductive powers draw Jack out of his boredom. Before long, Jack is entangled in a dangerous affair that costs him not only his marriage, but his job, house, and security. Soon, the man who had it all finds himself homeless and stripped of all of his former power. But even these losses pale in comparison to the frightening truth he discovers about his mistress: she’s linked to a dark circle of people who are stealing from Jack’s company and selling secrets to not only rival companies, but countries that are embroiled in war. Even after jilting him, Lora sets Jack up to take the fall for his boss’s murder and leads him on a destructive path that has him pursued by the police for the heinous crimes. Jack’s story is one of delicious irony, as his pursuit of happiness at the cost of his loved ones results in his own destruction. Fast-paced and gripping, Jack and Joanna’s domestic troubles serve as a mere steppingstone to his intense struggle for safety as well as redemption for his sins. Although his mistakes are many, Jack emerges as sympathetic and heroic as he sets out to right the wrongs he himself set into motion. The novel packs in sex, espionage, murder, and betrayal in an original and compelling mix.
A cautionary tale of one man’s overreaching for excitement and the deadly consequences.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4918-7283-3
Page Count: 230
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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