Krueger, author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series (Purgatory Ridge, 2001, etc.), keeps his complex plot chugging along on...
Above-average suspenser about a stand-up Secret Service agent who falls for FLOTUS.
First Lady of the United States, that is, in case your Beltway Buzz-worder hasn’t been updated recently: in this case, the beautiful, bright, terribly troubled Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. The thing is that Kate’s lost confidence in her husband. Clay Dixon, former pro-football star, came to the presidency imbued with a heroic sense of mission too soon squandered by the exigencies of practical politics. Kate deplores this, considers it a form of betrayal, insists to Clay that he’s surrounded himself with egregious opportunists, not the least of whom is his own unprincipled father, the sinister senior senator from Colorado. So serious is the rift between FLOTUS and POTUS that Kate has moved from the connubial quarters to the Lincoln Bedroom. “I used to sleep in a great man’s bed,” she tells Clay bitterly. “I want to remember what that was like.” Then suddenly, back in Minnesota, Kate’s father suffers a mysterious accident. Or was it? Secret Service Agent Bo Thorsen—brave, resourceful, smitten—doesn’t think so. He’s become convinced that Kate’s been lured home because someone—a diabolically clever and unequivocally lethal someone—wants her more accessible: it’s a trap, in other words. No one believes him, except Kate, who trusts him on sight and whose feeling for him no doubt transcends what is seemly, though both behave with admirable and honorable restraint. So who wants to murder an extremely popular First Lady? Is she the target of highly placed conspirators, seeking to forestall, at any cost, the negative impact of a divorced president? Or is the villain a more personal bête noire, a nightmarish figure out of Kate’s own long-ago, not a whit less deadly for being half-forgotten?
Krueger, author of the Cork O’Connor mystery series (Purgatory Ridge, 2001, etc.), keeps his complex plot chugging along on track until an overwrought and overlong last act derails it.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-4584-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.
Suspense queen Ware's (The Woman in Cabin 10, 2016, etc.) third novel in three years introduces four women who have been carrying a terrible secret since their boarding school days, a secret that is about to be literally unearthed.
Isa Wilde, happy in her life as a new mother, receives a text one morning that simply reads, I need you, and hours later, she boards a train bound for the coastal village of Salten with her infant daughter in tow. She has come at her friend Kate’s summons, and soon they are joined by two other women who received the same text, Thea and Fatima. Fifteen years earlier, all four were best friends at Salten House, sneaking off campus on the weekends to spend time with Kate’s father, an art teacher, and her handsome, mysterious brother, Luc. Their school days ended in tragedy and scandal, however, and the four haven’t been back to Salten since they were expelled. Now, a bone has been found in the marshes, and Kate has called the others back in a panic. They know more about the body than they should, but even they don’t know the truth. Ware’s third outing is just as full of psychological suspense as her earlier books, but there is a quietness about this one, a slower unraveling of tension and fear, that elevates it above her others. Though there's still a fair dash of drama, it doesn’t veer into the realm of melodrama, developing consistently with the characters and with their personalities and pasts. Isa is a sympathetic narrative voice though her obsession with the concerns of new parenthood may put some readers off.
Cancel your plans for the weekend when you sit down with this book, because you won’t want to move until it’s over.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5600-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Tepid terrors along the way to a mildly surprising end.
Suburban thriller from the prolific Coben (No Second Chance, 2002, etc.), about a perfect husband who disappears when a photo from the past shows up in the latest batch from the photomat.
Perfectly in love since their romantic meeting in France 15 years earlier, Jack and Grace Lawson are living the suburban dream: Windstar, Saab, daughter, son. He makes lots of money, she makes lots of art. There is a teeny flaw. Grace limps. It’s the scar she bears from the trauma she endured before the trip to France. There was this rock concert. Shots were fired. Panic. Deaths. Heroism. Cowardice. Badly mangled Grace made it out of a coma with a week or two of memory gone and a healthy dislike of big crowds. Suddenly the superperfect life she has built from the ruins has gone off the rails. Tucked in among a set of newly developed photos is a snap taken sometime in the ’80s. It shows a group of young people, possibly hip for the decade, and one of the lads, while hairier and callower, is clearly Jack. The insertion could only have been at the hands of the slacker in the Kodak kiosk, but he’s disappeared. And, upon viewing the photo, so has Jack, leaving Grace to ask that old reliable story-starting question: “Just who is this man I thought I knew?” Answers must be found quickly, for handsome Jack has been captured by a cold-blooded, sadistic, Korean killer and lies senseless in the boot of the stolen family minivan. Detective assistance comes from a rogue District Attorney, a wacky girlfriend, a lovelorn neighbor, a tough Jewish cop with a hole in his heart where his wife used to be, a shadowy, powerful mob guy whose son died at the rock concert, and possibly from Jimmy X, the rocker whose concert seems to have started the present subdivisional mayhem all those years ago.
Tepid terrors along the way to a mildly surprising end.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-525-94791-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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