The hints of romance are less than convincing, but the agonizingly detailed pairing of two determined women, complicated by...
A police detective tracks a resourceful serial killer in Perry’s latest nail-biter (Dead Aim, 2002, etc.).
Although she’s lived off wealthy men for a long time, Tanya Starling never killed any of them until doing in Dennis Poole. But she’s embarked on a fearsome learning curve. Fleeing from Portland to San Francisco, she assumes a new identity as Rachel Sturbridge, methodically destroys every trace of Tanya Starling and takes off for Los Angeles when the Bay City gets too hot. As Nancy Mills of LA, she has no scruples about killing a bank manager who knew her as Tanya, or the medical-supplies salesman she picked up for a good time, or the neighbor who recognizes her from a videotape taken outside the salesman’s building. When will her suddenly murderous career end? Det. Sgt. Catherine Hobbes of Portland Homicide succeeds in tracking her down the coast but keeps coming up just inches short. Meantime, Dennis’s cousin Hugo, a crooked businessman who won’t sleep easy until he’s sent a message that nobody messes with his family, has hired raffish Hollywood private eye Joe Pitt to work with Catherine. The two develop a wary mutual respect, but when Catherine sends Joe packing, Hugo raises the stakes by replacing him with Calvin Dunn, an enforcer whose clear brief is to kill Nancy Mills, not turn her over to the police. The entry of this wild card turns a two person cat-and-mouse game into a deadly free-for-all, with Perry in top form as he skillfully prevents readers from seeing around every curve. It’s not until Nancy’s very last disguise, after she’s hidden in the least likely place imaginable, that the tension runs along familiar genre lines.
The hints of romance are less than convincing, but the agonizingly detailed pairing of two determined women, complicated by the intrusion of a freelance killer, is masterful.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6004-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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