Green (The First 48, 2004, etc.) craftily attenuates the suspense and works some nice wrinkles into a familiar formula.
After almost 20 years in prison, an innocent man escapes to hunt down the cabal that framed him.
Quotes from The Count of Monte Cristo appropriately introduce the multiple sections of the story, which begins with the revelation that hero and narrator Raymond White is struggling to survive in upstate New York’s Auburn Prison. It then flashes back more than a decade, when the half–Native-American Raymond is a rising star in both his Syracuse law firm and the local Republican Party. His reclusive blue-collar dad doesn’t even have a phone and disdains Raymond’s affluent lifestyle but is grudgingly proud of his son’s achievements. Supported by a handful of youngish political power brokers—Bob Rangle, Paul Russo and Frank Steffano—Raymond preps to succeed ailing Syracuse Congressman Roger Williamson, a fellow Princeton alumnus. When Raymond visits Williamson, who’s linked to an IV, he reluctantly agrees to carry an envelope full of cash to Williamson’s mistress, Celeste Oliver. When he delivers it, Celeste offers herself to him, as Williamson’s successor. The moralistic Raymond, thinking also of beautiful, devoted fiancée Lexis, deflects the pass. Next day, Celeste is found murdered, and forensic evidence points to Raymond as the killer. In short order, he’s off the fast track to fame and on to prison. While there, Lexis marries Frank, who, Raymond learns, has strong links to organized crime. Frank and Lexis establish a glamorous life in Manhattan. Raymond, meanwhile, gets an education in survival and also in the deeper meaning of life from wise old inmate Lester. Much prison time is also given to plotting retribution. After 18 years, Raymond escapes, and radical plastic surgery allows him to get close to his quarry, while a compassionate new love named Helena smooths the transition into society and he implements his methodical revenge.
Green (The First 48, 2004, etc.) craftily attenuates the suspense and works some nice wrinkles into a familiar formula.Pub Date: May 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-446-53145-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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