Woods (L.A. Times, 1993, etc.) offers a high-concept action thriller that never lives up to its potential. Just imagine movie titles rolling over a helicopter as it ``beats its way'' over Atlanta Federal Prison. There's a loud Dolby track of the engine as the camera pans the prison walls and zooms in on a crowd of nasty convicts swarmed around two fighting men. ``What's going on down there?'' asks Kipling Fuller of the US Attorney General's office. What's going on is that Jesse Warden, 6 3' and 220 pounds of toughness (maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger or Steven Seagal; forget Bruce Willis) is serving two back-to-back life sentences because a dead cop and $500,000 in drug money were found in the trunk of his car. He's spent the first 14 months of his sentence in solitary confinement because each time he comes out, he gets into another fight. And why are all these hard-assed cons after Jesse's blood? Naturally, because he's heat—a cop. Kip and his boss, the creep who framed Jesse, offer him a deal. They will let him go if he will help them convict a seemingly indestructible Vietnam vet who heads a well-armed religious cult in the Idaho panhandle. They will also get a letter to his young daughter, Carrie, who was adopted after his wife died of cancer. In the working out of Jesse's victory (he finds his daughter, gets the bad guys, and screws the federal government) there's nothing to distract us from the predictable conventions. Jesse finds romance with Jenny, his large-breasted landlady, who has a daughter named Carey. After the climax, a Fourth of July of plastic explosives, he flies off into the sunrise with his woman and the homonymic girls. Naturally, he pilots his own jet. Roll credits. Woods never keeps up the power of his hard-muscled beginning. But he writes fairy tales for guys that continue to find a market. (Literary Guild alternate selection; $135,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017776-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
