Jane Whitefield usually makes people disappear (The Face-Changers, 1998, etc.), but this time it’s money: mob money that prompts La Cosa Nostra to chase Native American Jane all over the country in a terrifically plotted nail-biter. When trying to explain her remarkable talent for aiding clients to elude the ill-disposed, Jane often credits her Senecan forebears, so many of them expert trackers (and un-trackers). Be that as it may, she’s world-class at the vanishing act’so good that by now the process has become addictive. Thus, despite those promises to her beloved husband, Dr. Carey McKinnon, few Whitefield fans will expect her to say no when 18-year-old Rita Shalford asks for help. Waiflike Rita kept house in Miami for Bernie Lupus, ostensible owner of a property that in reality belongs to a “Family” consortium. Waiflike in his own right (though 70), Bernie was for years the mob’s money-minder. Now, clinging together for support, he and Rita are on the run because the LCN (La Cosa Nostra) has grown nervous about the booty and distrustful of its minder. Through a friend, they’ve come to Jane. Not only do they want to disappear, they want that mountain of money wrested from the control of the wicked. But how? What can be done to ten billion dollars to remove it permanently from organized evil-doers? Easy, Jane says. Give it to organized good-doers, the Red Cross and hundreds upon hundreds of other charities, thereby chilling the blood of all self-respecting capos. Well, not so easy, actually, but the fun is in how it gets done, and in Jane’s elegant razzle-dazzle, as again and again the mob grabs at her slender form only to come up clutching thin air. Compulsively readable. If Jane seems to know more about everything than anybody else, so be it. You’ll like it that way.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45304-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
It’s difficult to drum up sympathy for this missing child, swaddled as she is in such a dull and harmless plot.
A questionable decision leaves a couple in a situation no parent wants to face: it’s the middle of the night and their baby is gone.
Anne and Marco Conti seem like the perfect upstate New York family. He runs a successful software development company while she stays home with 6-month-old Cora; maybe soon she’ll go back to work at the art gallery she loved. Yet looks are deceiving: his company is floundering, and she’s struggling with postpartum depression. A nice night out at a neighbor’s birthday party might be just the thing everyone needs. But when the babysitter cancels, Anne and Marco decide to leave Cora alone, taking the baby monitor with them and checking on her every half hour. This ends predictably badly. When they return, drunk, after 1:00 a.m., Cora is gone. What ensues is a paint-by-numbers police investigation, led by the personality-free Detective Rasbach, who seems to cycle through potential theories as to Cora’s whereabouts the same way Lapena must have in her early plotting stages, except it all ended up on the page. When it’s clear, or at least partially clear, what happened to the child, any remaining tension hisses out like a pricked balloon. Anne’s wealthy mother and stepfather seem a too-obvious plot device, and they are, while her issues with the very real problem of postpartum depression are merely glossed over or trotted out during faux-fiery monologues.
It’s difficult to drum up sympathy for this missing child, swaddled as she is in such a dull and harmless plot.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2108-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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