Parker’s seventh California thriller (Where Serpents Lie, 1998, etc.) leads with a bright new twist: the hero is Tim Hess, a retired, divorced, and childless cop with an apparent death sentence of cancer hanging over him as he goes about tracking down a serial killer. Meanwhile, he’s keeping company with—and taking orders from—good-looking, right uppity Detective Merci Rayborn, who can be one big pain and has already marked her way up the ladder of promotions. The two of them want to find the Purse Snatcher, a kidnaping slayer of beautiful Laguna County women. But since there are no bodies, only the women’s purses lying in blood, might they still be alive? As often happens with Parker novels, the main plot has familiar echoes, but that hardly matters when the reader is guaranteed a richly metaphoric and suspenseful ride to the end, especially as Hess’s deepening passion for Merci gives him ever more reason to live. It’s safe to say that Parker has never before come up with as moving an ending as he unwinds here, while titillating us along the way with a psycho whose only fault is his irresistible fixation on giving gorgeous women eternal beauty—just as the hormone treatments he’s been given to reduce his sexual cravings have given him a pair of breasts. Ah, Parker in top form.
Pub Date: May 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-7868-6288-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
Graham Greene he's not. Not even John le Carre or Geoffrey Household. But Ken Follett is here with that particularly British tone of controlled, leisurely tension—you'll feel it on the very first page—that can transform a not-very-original spy plot into a sly gavotte that has you holding your breath as the dancers slowly come together. The familiar D-Day gimmick: only one man can ruin the secrecy of the Normandy landing—a top German undercover agent known as "The Needle" because of his deadly stiletto. But Follett immediately declares his independence from cliches: by luring us over to The Needle's point of view, forcing us to admire his ingenuity (even as he murders a harmless landlady and then his own confederate); by making three-dimensional fellows of the British intelligence men who must catch The Needle before he makes contact with a German submarine; and by dropping in the apparently extraneous story of a young, unhappy man and wife who've been living on an empty North Sea island ever since the husband lost his legs in a honeymoon car accident. Ah, but of course, we know that this couple will be linked to The Needle, and it's with satisfaction that we watch the spy being washed up, half dead, on that island in his attempt to reach a German ship. What then follows—the romance between The Needle and the lovestarved wife, their hideous and unwilling death-duel—is badly marred by explicit sex and explicit sentimentality that, like Follett's occasional anachronistic or heavyhanded fumbles, violate the tone and period feel. But perhaps it's just as well: if Follett's debut were flawless, he'd have nowhere to go. As it is, Eye of the Needle introduces a fresh if not especially distinctive voice in suspense—and is easily the best first novel in the espionage genre since The Day of the Jackal.
Pub Date: July 31, 1978
ISBN: 006074815X
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1978
The perfect gift for well-read mystery mavens who complain that they don’t write them like they used to.
A ghoulish killer brings a Boston bookseller’s list of perfect fictional murders to life—that is, to repeated, emphatic death.
The Red House Mystery, Malice Aforethought, The A.B.C. Murders, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, The Drowner, Deathtrap, The Secret History: They may not be the best mysteries, reflects Malcolm Kershaw, but they feature the most undetectable murders, as he wrote on a little-read blog post when he was first hired at Old Devils Bookstore. Now that he owns the store with mostly silent partner Brian Murray, a semifamous mystery writer, that post has come back to haunt him. FBI agent Gwen Mulvey has observed at least three unsolved murders, maybe more, that seem to take their cues from the stories on Mal’s list. What does he think about possible links among them? she wonders. The most interesting thing he thinks is something he’s not going to share with her: He’s hiding a secret that would tie him even more closely to that list than she imagines. And while Mal is fretting about what he can do to help stop the violence without tipping his own hand, the killer, clearly untrammeled by any such scruples, continues down the list of fictional blueprints for perfect murders. Swanson (Before She Knew Him, 2019, etc.) jumps the shark early from genre thrills to metafictional puzzles, but despite a triple helping of cleverness that might seem like a fatal overdose, the pleasures of following, and trying to anticipate, a narrator who’s constantly second- and third-guessing himself and everyone around him are authentic and intense. If the final revelations are anticlimactic, that’s only because you wish the mounting complications, like a magician’s showiest routine, could go on forever.
The perfect gift for well-read mystery mavens who complain that they don’t write them like they used to.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-283820-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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