An enjoyable tale with plenty of suspense and the bonus of intriguing medical details.
In this thriller, a devious serial killer remains on the loose in an Arizona hospital—will the culprit be discovered and stopped before the next victim dies?
Dr. Maya Summer is the hero of Miller’s tale. She is the harried public health director for a Phoenix hospital who also mentors medical residents who will soon be out on their own. Then there’s her self-effacing colleague Alex Reddish and her love interest, the rich and handsome cardiac surgeon Whitaker Thicket. Resident Jim Barrow is OK some days and spacey on others. What is his problem? Another resident is the flirty and presumptuous Veronica Sampson. At first, no one suspects there’s a killer. But after some party punch is spiked and Alex’s bike is tampered with, it soon becomes apparent that someone is up to no good. Between chapters, there are short passages from the killer’s journal—typical aggrieved and egotistical stuff. The Maya-Whit romance finally sours—he was by turns bullying and needy—so will something good happen with Maya and Alex? Unfortunately, Alex’s life may be in serious danger. Miller is not only an experienced novelist, but also a retired doctor, so readers learn a lot about local diseases (valley fever, West Nile, etc.) and drugs both natural and human-made. In that sense, the book is not just entertaining, but educational as well. A subplot, well handled, concerns Maya’s harassment by bikers (she is trying to get the Arizona helmet law reinstated) and a tragic accident in her past. There are also the requisite minor characters, like the grumpy but wise retired physician who counsels Maya and the sweet neighbor kid who loves horses. Phoenix, with its punishing summer weather beautifully described (“The sky stood dazed, a feeble ruined blue”), is almost a character itself, which perhaps explains the gripping novel’s ominous title. A few readers may guess the killer’s identity before the finale. The murderer, like Iago, displays a “motiveless malignity,” which always complicates matters.
An enjoyable tale with plenty of suspense and the bonus of intriguing medical details.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64779-016-5
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Nevada
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
