Parker slides into a gentle sophomore slump with his second mystery thriller. For all its deep characters and exotic action, this byzantine tale of Vietnam-seeded intrigue—set like his first in Orange County, Cal.—lacks the pungent ironies and manual-tight police procedures that made Laguna Heat such a fabulous and popular read. Part of the problem is that, despite his bumbling charms, hero Chuck Frye, ex-reporter and surfing star, scion of Laguna's wealthiest family, simply isn't as gripping a hero as Laguna Heat's cop hero. Parker compensates somewhat, however, by setting Chuck's adventures mostly within Orange County's huge and vastly intriguing Vietnamese community. Chuck's link to this clannish brood is lovely Li, Vietnamese wife of his older brother, Benny, war hero—he lacks the legs to prove it—and ace real-estate developer. When Li, a folk heroine to the community for her freedom songs, is kidnapped during a fete, the Frye family galvanizes to get her back. Trouble for Chuck is, Benny and his tyrannical dad just want him to stay out of the way: after all, he was the one swimming with little sister when she drowned 20 years before. That burden of guilt impels Chuck to search for Li, and before long he's deep in a self-made mess, finding and then losing the Vietnamese teen hood possibly behind the snatch, losing a videotape Benny's asked him to stash, and landing in jail when the local cops decide he's just too meddlesome. An affair with the new blond on the block soothes Chuck for a bit, but soon he jumps back into the muck, digging up evidence of a plot by old family friends and Vietnamese gangsters to use stolen monies to fund a real-estate deal, and finally unearthing Li's real kidnapper—a freedom-fighter-turned-commie betrayed by Benny in Vietnam. Par for California thrillers, here the sins of the past ravage the present, and after final bloodbaths Chuck has lost his brother but refound his pride, that blond, and entrÉe into his family. The Chandleresque plotting is so coiled as to nearly implode at times, and Chuck's redemption is too expected; withal, Parker remains a vivid stylist and an ultra-acute observer of California ways, with this uneven but still memorable work further proof that he's no flash in the pan, but a glowing fixture in the thriller firmament.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1988
ISBN: 0312357141
Page Count: 436
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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