Quintessential Child (One Shot, 2005, etc.)—preposterous as always, but oh, how those pages keep turning.
In this slick, swift, sexy thriller, it's Jack Reacher, the thinking man's Rambo, against a band of hand-picked, combat-hardened, armed-to-the-teeth, ex–special services guys, but, hey, there are only eight of them.
We're talking Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, Green Beret, British SAS and the like, all now free from their savage services but never from their training. Which is to render people dead without wasted motion or mercy. They're commanded by an ex–U.S. Army colonel who has formed these wacko killers into a group called Operational Security Consultants (read mercenaries), and who may be considerably off-kilter himself. Reacher comes into contact with them all by happenstance. Sitting in a favorite café, sipping espresso, he notices something odd about a certain parked car—and is noticed noticing. What he's seen, it turns out, is a car full of ransom money. It belongs to ex-Colonel Edward Lane, whose wife and step-child—Kate and Jade—have been kidnapped. In Reacher's world, however, it's a truism that kidnappings are not always what they appear. Kate, Reacher soon learns, is not Lane's first wife. Nor is she his first wife to be kidnapped. Reacher learns this from a young woman with vengeance on her mind. For four years, Patti Joseph, the first Mrs. Lane's sister, has kept Lane under personal surveillance, convinced that he murdered her sister, intent on making him pay for it. From private eye Lauren Pauling—green-eyed and elegant—Reacher learns more about Lane, none of it redeeming. In and out of bed, Reacher and Pauling form an effective team, mounting a search-and-destroy operation that eventually takes them across the Atlantic to what amounts to an English O.K. Corral.
Quintessential Child (One Shot, 2005, etc.)—preposterous as always, but oh, how those pages keep turning.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-33669-1
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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