Parker at his worst. As the body count rises among competing factions, Jesse and Crow take turns exchanging Zenlike...
Parker’s second-string hero, police chief Jesse Stone (High Profile, 2007, etc.), moves deeper into Spenser territory, for better or worse, when he tangos with an adversary-turned-ally who’s as tough and laconic as he is.
Ten years ago, a violent, determined gang of crooks cut off Stiles Island from the rest of Paradise, Mass., took the residents hostage, killed some of them and robbed the rest. Now, as if he’s been waiting for the statute of limitations to expire, Wilson Cromartie, last seen speeding off with millions of dollars, has returned to the scene of the crime. He hasn’t come to gloat, he assures Jesse in a courtesy call, but to find someone. Not that it matters, because none of Crow’s earlier victims, Jesse quickly ascertains, is willing to testify against him on the chance of linking him to a capital crime. Instead, Jesse plans to keep an eye on Crow, who claims to be an Apache warrior, and see what happens. What happens is that the former hit man rapidly tracks down Amber Francisco, 14, at the request of her father, a moneyed South Florida racketeer. Though the girl, a potty-mouthed Lolita whose sex partners include gangbanger Esteban Carty and his comrades in the Horn Street Boys, is no prize, Louis Francisco wants her back and her mother dead. But Apache warriors have their standards, and Crow, who’s already shot one of the Horn Street contingent, refuses to kill any women; as subsequent events demonstrate, he’d much rather sleep with them. So Francisco gets on the phone and hires the surviving Horn Street Boys to kill mom and return his daughter, and Crow quixotically decides to join forces with Jesse to protect Amber.
Parker at his worst. As the body count rises among competing factions, Jesse and Crow take turns exchanging Zenlike aphorisms to cover their lack of motivation for behaving like a pair of loose cannons.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15460-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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