by Victor Methos ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2021
Dark, darker, and then some. But readers who can take it are in for quite a ride.
The last case between a federal prosecutor and the retirement she craves will take her to some truly harrowing places.
Four weeks after Kathy Pharr was sexually assaulted and beaten to death, police called to another house on Crimson Lake Road made a gruesome discovery with a surprise ending: Though, like Kathy, she’s draped in the trappings of one of 1960s Kenyan painter Sarpong’s four indelible pictures of death, yoga teacher Angela River isn’t quite dead herself. Even so, Cason Baldwin, of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, homicide detective Lucas Garrett of the Las Vegas Sheriff’s Office, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jessica Yardley of the Special Victims Unit all treat Angela as a second victim of the monster that freelance reporter Jude Chance has dubbed the Crimson Lake Executioner. Since Kathy’s 14-year-old daughter, Harmony, went missing shortly after her mother was killed, the obvious suspect is Kathy’s husband, Tucker, who’s already served time for kidnapping Sue Ellen Jones 18 years ago. But Yardley’s growing friendship with Angela soon diverts her attention from Tucker Pharr to Angela’s live-in lover, ER physician Michael Zachary, and the evidence the police find in Zachary’s garage is as damning as the tone of Angela’s voice when she tells Yardley she never wants to see her again. Confronted in court by the unexpectedly resourceful Dylan Aster, who talks Zachary into accepting his representation and then sets himself resolutely against the presiding judge, Yardley’s forced to consult the expert on painting and serial murder she’d sworn never to see again: her ex-husband, Eddie Cal, who’s been imprisoned ever since sending 12 victims to their graves in A Killer’s Wife (2020).
Dark, darker, and then some. But readers who can take it are in for quite a ride.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2094-7
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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by Stephen King ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2023
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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SEEN & HEARD
by Michael Connelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2023
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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