This time out, Patterson (Jack and Jill, 1996, etc.) summons some brio and does a magic hat trick with the million-dollar—promo thriller genre. The most brilliantly drawn character here is a genetically engineered 11-year-old girl, Max (for Maximum), who is half-bird and can fly; that Patterson pulls off a satisfying account of the bioengineering that created the girl is a credit to his background research in genetics. As for the story itself, FBI agent Tom Brennan (a.k.a. Kit Harrison) is a loose cannon at the Dearer office. He was hired for that very quality, his ability to work outside the Bureau's paralyzed imagination, but his obsession with the murders of two geneticists, plus the death of his wife and two sons in a plane crash, has caused the Bureau to send him off to Nantucket for a rest. Instead, Brennan goes on a private crusade into a Colorado area, where he suspects some illegal biological engineering is taking place. He rents a cabin behind the animal hospital of veterinarian Frannie O'Neill, whose husband David, a doctor, was murdered a year ago. Then her friend Frank, also a doctor, is murdered as well. Thus far, all is standard-thriller fare—until Frannie rescues the wounded bird-girl Max, whom she finds in the woods and captures with Tom. (Max has escaped from the big, dark genetics lab where she was raised.) Patterson limns Max marvelously, giving her real weight on the page, and when Max, Tom, and Frannie rescue four younger bird-children from the lab—Peter, Wendy, Icarus, and Oz—the story rises well above standard, with Patterson showing an especially skilled hand with children's dialogue. Big warm feelings, usually foreign to thrillers, coax laughter during times of high tension. Reads like a dream.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 1998
ISBN: 0446676438
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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