Colson’s fifth (The Forsaken, 2014, etc.) is another wild ride for a flawed, valiant hero who’s impossible to dislike.
The sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, is out of a job but not out of trouble.
When former Army Ranger Quinn Colson became sheriff, he cleaned up drug gangs, solved murders old and new, and helped the county recover from a devastating tornado. But he didn’t win re-election or bring down his archenemy, Johnny Stagg, whose legal businesses are just a cover for a vast network of corruption and criminal activities. There are hopeful signs, though. Stagg’s efforts to bribe incoming sheriff Rusty Wise are going nowhere, and his new right-hand man, Ringold, is actually an FBI agent working with Colson to bring him down. Colson and deputy Lillie Virgil have just hauled Colson’s troubled sister, Caddy, out of a Memphis crack house and into a rehab facility. Lillie’s problems go back to her childhood and the recent murder of the man she loved, whose killer Colson is still seeking. Meantime, a couple of good old boys plot to steal a bundle from local lumber-mill owner Larry Cobb with the help of an Alabama safecracker and his dumb, football-crazed nephew. Mickey Walls hates Cobb, his ex-father-in-law, and enlists his friend Kyle to work with the burglars while he establishes an alibi. Unable to open the safe, the luckless crew hauls it away, attracting the attention of a deputy who’s wounded by the nephew. Along with money and jewels, the safe contains the detailed books Cobb kept of all his crooked dealings, details that could ruin political careers and send many to jail. Colson is left pondering his future job possibilities, his continuing romance with his high school sweetheart (who’s just split with her husband), and his relationship with his long-absent father. But unless he and Lillie clean up the latest crimes, he may not live to worry about his future.
Colson’s fifth (The Forsaken, 2014, etc.) is another wild ride for a flawed, valiant hero who’s impossible to dislike.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17394-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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