Collins (of Road to Perdition fame) wraps up his trilogy of thrillers on the John F. Kennedy assassination (Target Lancer, 2012, etc.), piling the conspiracy theories nearly as high as the corpses.
As the book opens, superbly well-connected detective Nathan Heller nearly becomes one of those corpses himself. It’s 1964, a year since JFK was killed, but there's something about the mysterious man who almost ran down Heller and his son in Chicago after a Beatles concert that leads Heller to think the president’s death left some unfinished business. As he bounces from Chicago to Los Angeles to Dallas, Heller recalls his own place in JFK’s orbit—he was involved in an FBI and CIA plot to take down Fidel Castro, with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby playing bit roles. Soon, he uncovers not just the convoluted plot to kill Kennedy (those who’ve seen Oliver Stone’s JFK will know its rough outline), but an effort to eradicate anybody who might leak how the assassination really went down. In Heller, Collins has mastered the tone of an old-school dick, though the clipped patter sometimes feels like reprocessed Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane. (Echoes of Spillane aren’t surprising, since Collins has co-authored his books.) And the book often wears its research like a Mafia goon’s ill-fitting suit, with characters talking expansively about intricate details of the assassination plot. (The book’s pages of acknowledgments are largely filled with citations of conspiracy-theory lit.) More entertaining are Heller’s moments with investigative reporter Flo Kilgore, who’s working to expose the JFK plot. Their relationship is a fun gender switch, putting Heller in the typical girl Friday role, and their banter about sex and politics gives the narrative a needed spark.
No threat to the Warren Commission, but a fun, light foray into alternative history.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3626-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY
Did you like this book?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
17
GET IT
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Did you like this book?
A plain-Jane daughter’s 31st birthday celebration explodes into a nightmare within a nightmare in Slaughter’s latest stand-alone.
Andrea Oliver’s always felt inferior to her parents. Her father, Gordon Oliver, is a trusts and estates attorney; her mother, Dr. Laura Oliver, is a speech therapist. Andy herself has never aspired to any career goal higher than serving as an assistant to someone important. Even when she left Belle Isle, Georgia, for the Big Apple, she got nowhere, and she was only too eager to return home when her mother announced three years ago that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. As the two women mark Andy’s birthday by sharing lunch in a mall cafe, a crazed shooter opens fire on a mother-and-daughter pair who’ve stopped to greet Laura, and Andy’s life changes in an instant. Or rather two instants, the first when the shots ring out and the second when Laura, after inviting the killer to shoot her next, coolly and dispassionately dispatches him. It takes the dazed Andy hours to realize that her mother’s not at all who she seems to be, and by the time she’s ready to accept the fact that Laura Oliver is a woman with a past, that past is already racing to catch up with both mother and daughter. Cutting back and forth between Andy’s harrowing flight to nowhere after Laura pushes her out of her home and a backstory 30 years earlier involving the Army of the Changing World, a cell of amateur terrorists determined to strike a mortal blow against greedy capitalists and, it eventually turns out, each other as well, Slaughter (The Good Daughter, 2017, etc.) never abates her trademark intensity, and fans will feel that the story is pumping adrenalin directly into their bloodstreams. Long before the end, though, the impostures, secret identities, hidden motives, and double-crosses will have piled up past the point of no return, leaving the tale to run on adrenalin alone.
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a season ticket on a ride that never lets you off.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243027-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Did you like this book?
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
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.
