The political intrigue seems barely to keep up with real-life electioneering in the Land of Lincoln this season. The best...
An Illinois Congresswoman caught in a tough re-election campaign narrowly survives what’s clearly an attempt on her life. Or is it?
Faced with an onslaught of unanswered ads financed by her right-wing opponent Trent Dorsey’s Uncle Ken, Jessica Bradshaw, a seasoned incumbent from Danton, has seen her polling figures dip alarmingly. Instead of a comfortable lead, she’s now riding a cushion of 1 percentage point. So Jessica’s chief of staff, Abby Malone, puts out an SOS for hands-on help from her campaign manager, wily veteran consultant Dev Conrad. Dev does everything he can to help prepare Jessica for her next debate while reining in her vainglorious husband, Ted, a one-time tennis wannabe. But not even Dev can stop someone from firing a rifle at Jessica as she leaves the debate. Although common sense suggests that the shooter is one of the thousands of well-armed yahoos supporting Dorsey, common sense, as Dev knows (Flashpoint, 2013), rarely prevails in political campaigns. But he’s as surprised as anyone when Danton Police Chief Aaron Showalter announces that the rifle in question has been found in the car trunk of Cory Tucker, a political science undergraduate interning with the Bradshaw campaign, and intimates that Jessica’s own allies hired someone to bolster her numbers by shooting over her head. Fortunately for Dev but not so fortunately for the story, Detective Karen Foster takes this opportunity to share her long-festering suspicions about her department with Dev, who follows her nose to a conspiracy that wanders far afield from the Bradshaw shooting before Gorman brings the tale back full circle in the closing chapters.
The political intrigue seems barely to keep up with real-life electioneering in the Land of Lincoln this season. The best gift to series fans is the hope that Dev will end up with a woman who accepts him warts and all.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8466-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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