A diverting thriller with thoughtful commentary on a timely issue.
A bank-fraud analyst’s life is upended when she takes on a human trafficking ring in Scott’s topical religious thriller.
The boldest thing about Jesse Jonsen, the principal fraud analyst for Minneapolis-based Uncle Sam Bank,isn’t the fact that she wears jeans in the boardroom, but rather the ingenuity of her pitch to use analysis of credit card purchases to locate human traffickers and apprehend them during the upcoming Super Bowl in Minneapolis. When her bureaucratic bosses turn her down, she retreats to her favorite coffee shop, where she first meets Leilani, a young sex worker with an abusive boyfriend. Jesse’s lingering guilt about her past as a prolific shoplifter and purveyor of fake IDs—the latter of which led to a friend’s death—makes her determined to pursue her plan to bring sex traffickers to justice on the nearby campus of North Prairie University. There, groomers force “work-study associates” into sex work at northern Minnesota resorts frequented by police, congressmen, and other powerful people; among those groomers is Jesse’s boss, the senior vice president of operations at Uncle Sam Bank, who frames her for fraud. Scott’s novel opens with the discovery of a dead body in the Mississippi River—a pitch-perfect beginning for any thriller—and keeps the intrigue coming in briskly paced, short chapters that reflect its protagonist’s no-nonsense style; they also highlight her tendency to attract dangerous elements, whether she’s actively looking for pimps or just working at Dairy Queen.Tense action scenes and courtroom intrigue are coupled with Christian messaging that ramps up near the book’s end, focused primarily on the Sermon on the Mount. However, even non-Christian readers will find the novel noteworthy for its realistic, though never graphic, depiction of the dark world of human trafficking; these scenes, the author notes, are largely drawn from his own interviews with a former gang leader, pimp, and drug dealer. Fans of Scott’s previous novels will be treated to a cameo by world-saving IT guy Jerry Barkley, which subtly suggests a fictional thriller-verse.
A diverting thriller with thoughtful commentary on a timely issue.Pub Date: March 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781962168656
Page Count: 423
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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