Patterson's thrillers (Virgin, 1980; Black Market, 1986) have plummeted in quality since his promising debut in The Thomas Berryman Number (1976)—with this latest being the sorriest yet: a clanky and witless policer about a criminal mastermind and the cop sworn to take him down. Aside from watching sympathetic homicide dick John ("Stef") Stefanovich comeing to terms with a wheelchair-bound life—legacy of a shotgun blast to the back by drug-and-gun-running archfiend Alexandre St.-Germain—the major interest here lies in marvelling at the author's trashing of fiction convention. The whopper comes early: although St.-Germain is explicity described as being machine-gunned to death by three vigilante cops in a swank brothel (". . .a submachine gun blast nearly ripped off the head of Alexandre St.-Germain"; "The mobster's head and most of his neck had been savaged by the machine-gun volley. The body looked desecrated. . ."), before you know it this latter-day Moriarty is stepping unscathed out of an airplane. What gives? Authorial cheating, that's what—thinly glossed over with some mumbling later on about a "body double." Not that St.-Germain's ersatz death generated much suspense anyway, with subsequent action focusing on, among other items, the gory killings of assorted mob bosses by one of the vigilante cops, and Stef's viewing of pornographic tapes confiscated from that brothel. But readers generous enough to plod on will get to read about the newly Lazarus-ized St.-Germain's crass efforts to revitalize and consolidate the world's crime syndicates ("the Midnight Club"), Stef's predictable tumble for a sexy true-crime writer, and how (isn't one miracle enough for Patterson?) at book's end Stef walks again and gets to embrace a rogue cop who's murdered several people. Ironsides with a badge and a lobotomy.
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1988
ISBN: 0446676411
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1988
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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