An uneven thriller that’s unpersuasive as revisionist history but has its points as a hard-knuckled critique of conventional...
Bob Lee Swagger comes out of retirement to solve the murder of John F. Kennedy.
Lots of people are killed in hit-and-run accidents, but Jean Marquez isn’t so sure that her husband was one of them. In the weeks before his untimely death, James Aptapton, an alcoholic writer and gun fanatic whose hero, Billy Don Trueheart, will surely ring a bell for fans of Hunter (Soft Target, 2011, etc.), had been bitten by the JFK conspiracy bug, and his widow has come to Idaho to ask Swagger what he thinks. He thinks he’ll pass until she drops one last detail: The ancient raincoat found in an elevator mechanism compartment in the Dal-Tex Building, just yards from the Texas Book Depository, showed signs of being run over by a bicycle. Hunter is at his best in unmasking problems with the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman—why did the third bullet he allegedly fired at the president explode without leaving any recognizable traces? Why did Oswald cock his rifle once more after the kill shot? Why, after shooting Officer J.D. Tippit three times, did he stop to administer an unnecessary coup de grace?—and proposing an alternative scenario that provides logical answers. But neither the conspiracy he invents nor the people who act it out, from Russian gangsters and oligarchs to a rogue CIA officer determined to protect the nation from Kennedy’s policies and the tight little crew he gathers around him, are credible for a moment, and his decision to alternate sections of the chief conspirator’s tell-all journals with Swagger’s dogged pursuit of him produces less tension than bemusement. If it weren’t for the promised firepower at the showdown, all but the staunchest conspiracy buffs would give up midway.
An uneven thriller that’s unpersuasive as revisionist history but has its points as a hard-knuckled critique of conventional wisdom on the assassination and a portrait of the hapless Oswald.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4020-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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