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RUNNER

For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.

After nine years of being AWOL, Jane Whitefield McKinnon, the world’s foremost specialist in hiding fugitives from their pursuers, is back with a vengeance.

Christine Monahan, 20 and pregnant, staggers into Buffalo General Hospital asking if anyone can direct her to Jane Whitefield. Her search would be easier if she knew that Dr. Carey McKinnon’s wife, the committee chair who’s just capped a successful fundraising effort, was the woman she was looking for. As it is, Christine doesn’t meet Jane until after the hospital has been bombed in an attempt to flush her out into the open. It’s only the first of many strategies employed by the six hired guns sociopathic San Diego developer Richard Beale has sent after the ex-employee who was also his ex-lover. Keeping six people on salary 24/7 runs into serious money, but Richard has compelling motives for hunting down Christine. It isn’t enough that she broke off the affair because he’d been so abusive, or that she’s learned some unsavory secrets about the family business Richard runs for his impossibly demanding parents, who consider him “a bully, a sneak, a loafer, a coward.” In addition, the baby she’s carrying has become his sole hope of keeping any claim to the family fortune. So Richard needs Christine and her unborn child back quickly and alive. Putting five years of domestic peace behind her, Jane snaps smartly to attention—“I have to leave tonight,” she tells her long-suffering husband—keeping Christine half a step ahead of her pursuers until she can get her settled in Minneapolis under a new identity. But since Jane’s clients never enjoy true peace, only breath-catching intervals before the next round of action, it’s never in doubt that sooner or later Richard’s crew will come calling in the Twin Cities, kicking off the last, and most generic, phase of this high-potency thriller.

For the most part, Jane’s many fans, who’ve missed her ever since Blood Money (2000), will be glad to see her at any price.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-15-101528-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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