Though Stroby (Shoot the Woman First, 2013, etc.) doesn’t exactly break new ground, readers hungry for an old-fashioned...
Crissa Stone’s fourth caper involves stealing some priceless antiquities from an owner so obliging that he offers to pay her and helps her plan the job.
Emile Cota has cut more than a few corners in amassing his collection. It’s just his luck that by the time the buyer he'd lined up for a cache of antiquities he pinched is ready to take delivery, he’s been identified and ordered to return his treasures to Iraq. Nothing daunted, he hires Crissa, whom he knows as Christine Wynn, to hijack them en route to their destination and arrange their delivery to the buyer. The job seems simple enough, since Randall Hicks, Cota’s factotum and security chief, will provide all the inside information she can possibly use and help with the logistics. Crissa reaches out to retired driver Bobby Chance, who hooks her up with a pair of Irishmen; Hicks calls in his Marine buddy Sandy Sandoval; they meet, practice their routines, and wait for what promises to be a bloodless coup. Predictably, that’s not how it works out, and in short order, the conspirators are dispersed to the four winds, at least some of them determined to eliminate the others and grab the brass ring before anyone can turn informant against them. As the body count rises, the focus sharpens to a duel between Crissa and Hicks. Guess who wins.
Though Stroby (Shoot the Woman First, 2013, etc.) doesn’t exactly break new ground, readers hungry for an old-fashioned double-strength heist gone wrong could hardly do better.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06575-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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