Glorious deaths bursting with the guilty glow of sex.
All her pages suffused purple from lividity, Doc Gerritsen’s morgue slab awaits you, reader.
Brilliantly, Gerritsen (The Apprentice, 2002, etc.) has her regular Boston Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli play second lead to Medical Examiner Maura Isles, known as the Queen of the Dead, who autopsies all of Jane’s vics and supplies more deliciously grisly pages this time than in Gerritsen’s last two outings combined. While Rizzoli handles the crimes, Dr. Isles delivers arias on death and the sweet hell of human existence. And as much of this plays out against the frozen stones of Graystones Abbey—a nunnery where a youthful nun lies battered to death and an aged nun, also battered, is dying—as under Isles’s examining scalpel and X-ray photos of crushed skulls and bullet fragments scattered about a vic’s sternum. But Isles and Rizzoli are enmeshed and struggling as well with richly detailed love lives that have the reader suffering right along with the two leads, with Isles panting after her world-hopping divorced saint of a doctor-husband and Rizzoli fighting her lust for the FBI agent she bedded in The Apprentice—something she must pay for now. Autopsy reveals that the dead young nun had just given birth (no one knew she was pregnant) before being murdered in the midnight chapel. Where’s the baby? Another murder pops up in a deserted Italian restaurant: a woman with her hands and feet removed and her face stripped off. Why her feet? Or her face? Now, that’s enough. “A place of death has a power all its own. Long after the body is removed and the blood scrubbed away, such a place still retains the memory of what has happened there. It holds echoes of screams, the lingering scent of fear. And like a black hole, it sucks into its vortex the rapt attention of the living, who cannot turn away, cannot resist a glimpse into hell.”
Glorious deaths bursting with the guilty glow of sex.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45891-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Not this time, though. The fact-based mutilations are so outré you just know the answer’s going to be a letdown, and it...
Dead fish and game are only the appetizers for Warden Joe Pickett’s biggest problems in his fourth case.
It’s obvious that cavalier local fisherman Jeff O’Bannon is to blame for the fish floating belly-up in Crazy Woman Creek. But who’s killed the elk, excised the flesh from half his face, and dragged off his enormous carcass? Who’s killed 12 head of Don Hawkins’s cattle in exactly the same way? And has this slaughter of innocents been nothing more than preparation for the remarkably similar murders of ranch hand Tuff Montegue and water-engineering exec Stuart Tanner? Robey Hersig, the County Attorney heading the hastily assembled Northern Wyoming Murder and Mutilations Task Force, lists the likeliest causes: “BIRDS . . . CULTS . . . DISTURBED INDIVIDUALS . . . ARABS . . . GOVERNMENT AGENTS . . . GRIZZLY BEAR . . . ALIENS.” But Joe, skeptical of all these explanations, demands the right to investigate on his own. Even though his mortal enemy, Sheriff Bud Barnum, keeps reminding him he’s only a fish-and-game warden, nobody can deny that Joe’s pulled off some spectacular victories in the past (Winterkill, 2003, etc.).
Not this time, though. The fact-based mutilations are so outré you just know the answer’s going to be a letdown, and it is—even though Joe and his family sweat out suspenseful duels with a self-styled paranormal expert and a trusted neighbor.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15200-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally...
After a hit-and-run kills a high school student, the court of public opinion convicts a lonely outcast.
When Jackie Reed hears her 17-year-old son, Wade, sneaking out the night before the SATs, she knows she should stop him; instead, she pops a Xanax and returns to bed. At 4 a.m., Jackie’s 13-year-old, Connor, wakes to find a rain-soaked Wade hiding something in his closet; he considers tattling but promises to keep quiet. These seemingly innocuous decisions come back to haunt Jackie and Connor the next morning. While Officer Pearl Maze was working the graveyard shift at the Havenkill, New York, police department, Amy Nathanson burst through the door claiming to have been carjacked. According to Amy, her screams summoned 17-year-old Liam Miller, whom the thief ran over during his escape. The cops canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, and the Reeds are stunned to realize that Wade matches the suspect’s description. Evidence mounts against him, and the community ostracizes his family, but still Wade refuses to divulge his whereabouts at the time of the accident. The book opens with Wade’s suicide note, then flashes back five days and unfolds from the perspectives of Jackie, Connor, Pearl, and Amy. This narrative shift maximizes suspense by forcing readers to guess at Wade’s thoughts and actions, allowing Gaylin to insightfully explore the crime’s ripple effects.
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally develops between teenagers and their families and stocks it with sharks.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-264111-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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