A layered, thrilling read that will likely motivate fans to read the final book, too.
After escaping Jim Doane, Eve Duncan navigates the Colorado wilderness to gain her freedom, while the people she loves scramble to find and rescue her.
Jim Doane is a father determined to avenge his son’s murder, and to that end, he has kidnapped Eve Duncan, a forensic sculptor, to reconstruct Kevin’s skull. But there are other reasons he wants Eve under his power, secrets in Eve’s past, of which she's not even aware, that will place her in grave danger. After learning some of Doane’s intentions, as well as the shocking truth that compelled him to make Eve a pawn in his deadly plan, Eve has escaped him and must keep out of his reach in dense forest far removed from civilization. Doane is a lifelong hunter, but Eve has great instincts, along with some tricks she’s picked up from her lover, Joe, an ex-SEAL, and she manages to hold her own. Meanwhile, Joe, their adoptive daughter, Jane, and a small posse of new and old friends and allies are using every weapon at their disposal to find Eve. The quest will force Jane and two possible love interests to work together; demand that Joe partner with the mysterious Zander and his enigmatic assistant, Stang; and forge an alliance between Margaret, a complex psychic, and Dr. Kendra Michaels, an investigator with finely honed powers of deduction and observation. Working in different corners of the country, the three teams will ultimately wind up in the same forest where Eve is fighting for her life, but a couple of surprising turns will make her Doane’s hostage again. In an explosive final scene, all seems lost until Margaret opens the door to hope—and another cliffhanger ending leading to Book 3. Johansen’s second in a planned trilogy revolving around Eve’s kidnapping and (readers can only expect) rescue will keep readers engaged in Eve’s fate and intrigued by the many characters who are working together to bring her to safety.
A layered, thrilling read that will likely motivate fans to read the final book, too.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01999-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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