Not to fear: Just because megaselling Patterson has teamed up once more with journalist collaborator de Jonge (Miracle on the 17th Green, 1996) doesn’t make the pace of this slick, ludicrous thriller any slower, the puppets any more complex, or the sentences any longer.
The East Hampton cops say that proletarian nobody Peter Mullen stopped parking cars to smoke a joint and drown during zillionaire Barry and Campion Neubauer’s Memorial Day Party in Montauk. Forensic evidence shows that Peter was beaten to death before he was tossed into the frigid water. But when Peter’s brother Jack, a student at Columbia Law who’s a summer associate at the Manhattan firm of Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel, and his old high-school buddies press the authorities to tell the truth, Rory Hoffman, a sinister thug called the Fixer, presses back, and soon the good guys are on the ropes. Jack’s father suffers a fatal heart attack. Fisherman Fenton Gridley is nearly drowned himself. Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jane Davis is intimidated into perjury. Hairdresser Sammy Giamalva’s 11:30 appointment cancels at the last minute. Jack’s warned off the case by Chief Detective Frank Volpi, and his girlfriend, the Neubauers’ daughter Dana, bails on him—though luckily, Nelson, Goodwin and Mickel’s top investigator, Pauline Grabowski, who’s just as smart and beautiful, is poised to take her place. When Jack’s fired from the firm and Pauline soon follows, it’s clear that there’s no place the Neubauer tentacles don’t reach, and the outcome of the inquest is a foregone conclusion. What isn’t obvious, though in retrospect it should be, is Jack’s scheme for making sure justice is done anyway.
A vigilante pipe-dream topped off by toothlessly shocking revelations about characters even less substantial than the celebrity cameos: Dominick Dunne, Latrell Sprewell, Geraldo Rivera, and Billy “Mudman” Simon.Pub Date: June 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-96968-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
19
GET IT
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
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.
