Sharp pays meticulous attention to detail, but this novella reads as though the author’s grown weary of her own heroine's...
Close protection specialist Charlie Fox finds herself south of the border in a country devastated by a massive earthquake in Sharp’s latest (Die Easy, 2012, etc.).
While working to unmask the killer of a man sent as personal protection for an earthquake Rescue and Recovery team, Charlie meets a colorful cast of suspicious characters: a quirky Australian pilot named Riley; burly Joe Marcus, who served 20 years in the Marine Corps; Wilson, a Scot and former paratrooper; and a young girl, Hope Tyler, whose best friend is a yellow Lab with a talent for finding anything, including human beings, both dead and alive. One of the sponsors of the program isn’t satisfied with the explanations she received about how the man who once had Charlie’s job died and contracts with Charlie’s boss, Parker Armstrong, to determine the true nature of his death. She also wants to know whether or not the team she supports is on the up-and-up. Charlie, tough as gristle and relentlessly determined, ends up with some odd duties for a protection specialist—working orthodontic and forensic pathology in connection with the victims. But the real mystery is why the former protection agent was killed and who killed him. With a plot that encompasses everything from missing jewels to Hope’s true purpose, Sharp’s story is thin and not terribly satisfying. Charlie is her usual tough-talking, butt-kicking self, but this foray into the field—while displaying the author’s admirable adherence to fact and impressive research—feels both short and rushed, like a movie that’s just getting going when “The End” pops up. Readers may find the quasi-rape scene between Charlie and her former lover, Sean—it starts with him jumping her in a shower and ends with her forcing him to have sex—disturbing even though Sharp tries very hard to justify it.
Sharp pays meticulous attention to detail, but this novella reads as though the author’s grown weary of her own heroine's adventures.Pub Date: July 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63194-081-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.
In Hoag’s (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska.
Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department’s new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam’s first case without Nikki is the double murder—"raw animal violence"—of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor’s own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father’s unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam’s cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy’s widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy’s long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana’s lover and Lucien’s rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father’s murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor—Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"—Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai.
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95455-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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