A beautifully stripped-down case that makes up in tension and velocity what it lacks in amplitude. Serialization hasn’t hurt...
In a 12-hour adventure first serialized in weekly installments in the New York Times Magazine, Harry Bosch finally catches a fresh case after years of resurrecting old ones (Echo Park, 2006, etc.), and it’s a honey.
Before he was shot to death at a scenic overlook on Mulholland Drive, Stanley Kent was a medical physicist who had access to the radioactive cesium used to treat uterine cancer. Because the murder looks like an execution, Bosch and his new partner, Ignacio (“call me Iggy”) Ferras of LAPD Homicide Special, are under orders to grab the case from Hollywood Homicide. In a breathtakingly short time, though, it’s grabbed from them by Rachel Walling, Bosch’s former lover, and her take-no-prisoners FBI partner Jack Brenner. The reason: Shortly before he died, Kent had driven to St. Agatha’s Clinic for Women and removed dozens of doses of cesium at the demand of the masked thugs who’d broken into his home, tied up his wife and threatened to rape and kill her. Alicia Kent is still alive, but her husband isn’t, and the cesium has vanished. Captain Don Hadley, the well-connected nincompoop in charge of L.A.’s Department of Homeland Security, is convinced the threat of a dirty bomb is linked to anti-American provocateur Ramin Samir; the FBI is more intent on locating a Syrian terrorist who goes by the nickname Moby. But Bosch is convinced the Feds have missed important clues, and soon he’s dug up an eyewitness to the crime and found new evidence at the Kent home. Both discoveries send him barreling into a series of jurisdictional battles that almost upstage the terrorist threat.
A beautifully stripped-down case that makes up in tension and velocity what it lacks in amplitude. Serialization hasn’t hurt Connelly any more than it did Charles Dickens, who’s cited at several key points.Pub Date: May 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-01895-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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