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ENIGMA

A formulaic twofer combines some interesting philosophical questions with more familiar charges of Beltway corruption that...

Not one but two exciting new cases for Coulter’s FBI (Insidious, 2016, etc.).

Much to the displeasure of Detective Aldo Mayer of the D.C. Metro Police, Special Agent Dillon Savitch sneaks into the home of Kara Moody, a pregnant woman who's being held hostage by a seemingly crazy young man who's raving about unspecified dangers to both of them. After Savitch is forced to shoot the unidentified man, both he and Kara end up in the hospital—Kara in labor. Savitch is worried about the John Doe, who's still unconscious, and asks the police to provide protection, which Mayer pulls without timely notification. Only the presence of Kara, who's visiting his hospital room, saves the man from an assassin. When Kara’s newborn son, Alex, is kidnapped from the hospital, Savitch thinks finding his father may provide answers. Unfortunately, Kara remembers nothing of the party she attended at a friend’s house where she suspects she was roofied, raped, and impregnated. Savitch’s wife, Sherlock, works with the team that’s been set up to find missing babies while Savitch hunts for answers to the unidentified man’s background and an unusual drug found in his system. Meanwhile, Irish charmer Liam Hennessey , who prefers the moniker Manta Ray, is daringly broken loose while he’s on his way to prison for robbery and murder. Savitch asks ex–Army Ranger Special Agent Jack Cabot to join one of his new agents, Cam Wittier, in leading the manhunt because he knows that the escapee and his rescuers are headed into the Daniel Boone National Forest. The pair join a forest ranger and Police Chief Harbinger in a dangerous hunt. Hennessey, who had hidden the proceeds from his robbery of a bank's safe-deposit vaults, has apparently been freed by someone desperate to get back one of the missing items. In order to solve both cases, Savitch and his teams must go way beyond ordinary police work to come up with some surprising and horrifying motives.

A formulaic twofer combines some interesting philosophical questions with more familiar charges of Beltway corruption that could be ripped from the latest headlines.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3806-5

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017

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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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DRAGON TEETH

Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...

In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.

William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.

Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.

Pub Date: May 23, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

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