After nearly 30 years, Tracy Whitney hasn’t aged a day.
Bagshawe switches out the infamous jewel thief from the late Sheldon’s If Tomorrow Comes (1985) with a brilliant replica.
It's still the 1980s for Tracy Whitney. After landing in Brazil, she gets right down to business, pulling a scam on a ruthless businessman just before marrying her partner in crime, Jeff Stevens, in a private ceremony. The two are determined to leave their criminal pasts behind and start a family, but infertility problems—and a seductive co-worker—lead to a misunderstanding that sends Tracy packing. Tracy’s predilection for bad luck is true to the source material, and she’s just getting started. Jeff is long gone when Tracy finds out she’s finally pregnant. Bagshawe handles all the drama with a light touch. When Nicholas tricks a little girl out of her lunch money, proving without a doubt that he’s Jeff’s son, Tracy couldn’t be more proud that her kid is a budding con artist (so long as his victims are bullies). She builds a somewhat normal life with Blake Carter, a tragically nice guy who can't make Tracy forget about Jeff but who makes a convenient babysitter when her past catches up with her. A French detective thinks he can prove the connection between Tracy’s most notorious crimes and a serial killer with a penchant for prostitutes and hotel room Bibles, forcing Tracy out of hiding. Soon, she and Jeff are working with law enforcement to catch the killer as they lift gaudy jewels and priceless artifacts from supposedly well-secured museums and homes, all with wonderfully cheesy prose: “The air was scented with tropical blooms and expensive perfume and the aroma of white truffles wafted in from the kitchen. But in the end, the one overpowering smell was money.” It’s astonishing how much this book evokes the past.
After nearly 30 years, Tracy Whitney hasn’t aged a day.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-230402-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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