Pulse-pounding terror mixed with romance makes for page-turning pleasure.
Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, Coulter’s famous pair of married FBI agents, take on two cases that have roots buried deep in the past.
After the murder of her parents in Virginia, 12-year-old Allison Rendahl barely escaped by climbing out a window and hiding in a cave. Her Uncle Leo took her back to his home in Australia and raised her to be a strong woman who helped him lead extreme adventures, but her mental scars remain. Now, under the name Kirra Mandarian and after attending law school at the University of Virginia, she's returned to her hometown as a prosecuting attorney, hoping to solve the murder of her parents. Finding a painting by her father, who was an artist, with photos taped to the back gives her the clues she needs, and using the name Eliot Ness, she gathers and sends incriminating information to Agent Dillon Savich. On the other side of the country, 12-year-old piano virtuoso Emma Hunt, who was traumatized at age 6 when she was kidnapped by a troubled priest, becomes the target of another predator. Savich and Sherlock, his partner and wife, were involved in the original case, and the Hunt family is flying to D.C. both to attend Emma’s concert at the Kennedy Center and to get her into a safer environment. Emma’s grandfather, a sophisticated crime boss, could well be the reason Emma is targeted for kidnapping. At any rate, the people involved in both cases are stone-cold killers who will use any means to achieve their goals. Savich and Sherlock must identify those goals or die trying.
Pulse-pounding terror mixed with romance makes for page-turning pleasure.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-300413-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
A return to form for this popular author.
Spectral danger and human evil stalk Sager’s latest stalwart heroine.
When Maggie Holt’s father, Ewan, dies, she’s shocked to discover that she has inherited Baneberry Hall. Ewan made his name as a writer—and ruined her life—by writing a supposedly nonfiction account of the terrors their family endured while living in this grand Victorian mansion with a dark history. Determined to find out the truth behind her father’s sensational bestseller, Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall. Horror aficionados will feel quite cozy as they settle into this narrative, and Sager’s fans will recognize a familiar formula. As he has in his previous three novels, the author makes contemporary fiction out of time-honored tropes. Final Girls (2017) remains his most fresh and inventive novel, but his latest is significantly more satisfying than the two novels that followed. Interspersing Maggie’s story with chapters from her father’s book, Sager delivers something like a cross between The Haunting of Hill House and The Amityville Horror with a tough female protagonist. Ewan and Maggie both behave with the dogged idiocy common among people who buy haunted houses, but doubt about the veracity of Ewan’s book and Maggie’s desperate need to understand her own past make them both compelling characters. The ghosts and poltergeist activity Sager conjures are truly chilling, and he does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing until the very end. As was the case with past novels, though—especially The Last Time I Lied (2018)—Sager sets his story in the present while he seems to be writing about the past. For example, when the Holt family moved into Baneberry Hall in 1995 or thereabouts, Ewan—a professional journalist—worked on a typewriter. When Maggie wants to learn more about the history of Baneberry Hall, she drives to the town library instead of going online. Sager is already asking readers to suspend disbelief, and he makes that more difficult because it’s such a jolt when a character pulls out an iPhone or mentions eBay. This is, however, a minor complaint about what is a generally entertaining work of psychological suspense.
A return to form for this popular author.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4517-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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