Borrowing its basic plot structure from Agatha Christie‘s And Then There Were None (Christie’s book is directly referenced by some of the characters at several points), it tells the story of a group of seven university students who travel to a deserted island that was the scene of a grisly mass murder six months earlier, where events soon turn ominous.
Letty Davenport a young college girl receives a call from Skye a traveler she met briefly in San Francisco.
Remembering that Letty’s adoptive father is a detective she requests help in finding her companion Henry, who has just gone missing.
Soon Skye is missing as well and Detective Lucas Davenport decides to investigate further. He soon finds himself pursuing a drug dealer named Pilate in a chance that crosses state lines and exposes him to variety of sub cultures and their gatherings.
It evolves out of corruption during Boston’s Big Dig — the most expensive highway project in the United States, plagued by cost overruns, delays, leaks, design flaws, accusations of poor execution and use of substandard materials, criminal charges and arrests.
When former investigative reporter Rick Hoffman loses his job, fiancée, and apartment, his only option is to move back into–and renovate–the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since the stroke that put his father in a nursing home.
As Rick starts to pull apart the old house, he makes an electrifying discovery—millions of dollars hidden in the walls.
It’s enough money to completely transform Rick’s life—and everything he thought he knew about his father.
Yet the more of his father’s hidden past that Rick brings to light, the more dangerous his present becomes. Soon, he finds himself on the run from deadly enemies desperate to keep the past buried, and only solving the mystery of his father—a man who has been unable to communicate, comprehend, or care for himself for almost 20 years—will save Rick…if he can survive long enough to do it.
This book is too long. Too slow. And nobody would make the obvious mistakes Rick Hoffman does … BUT I still recommend it.
John Sandford is the writer I’ve been reading most over the past couple of months.
As I post, he’d published 34 books in the Prey series, featuring Lucas Davenport.
Eyes of Prey (1991) is only the 3rd book. And it’s very, very dark.
Davenport was depressed, maniacal, suicidal — not far removed from the serial killers he chased.
John Sandford:
Eyes of Prey was the third of the Lucas Davenport series, and, in my opinion, a genuinely nasty book. The first book, Rules of Prey, caught some thriller-fan attention because it was tough — a bad killer, and a bad cop chasing him. Even the Wall Street Journal liked it.
Then, in the second book, Shadow Prey, the bad guys got softer. In fact, the bad guys weren’t all that bad, really, but got killed anyway, which meant there was some moral ambiguity floating around in the punch bowl.
The doctor ordered a little more starkness in the third novel, and I got it with a couple of killers named Carlo Druze and Dr. Michael Bekker. Druze, though, was just a killer. Bekker was a raving blinkin’ maniac, and he’s the one that women seem to like.
Freida McFadden (born May 1, 1980) is the pen name of an American thriller author and practicing physician specializing in brain injury.
She began writing as a hobby, self-publishing starting 2013.
Her 2022 book The Housemaid was an international bestseller.
She’s known for the twists and turns in her plots. And unreliable narrators.
Tegan is eight months pregnant, alone, and desperately wants to put her crumbling life in the rearview mirror. So she hits the road, planning to stay with her brother until she can figure out her next move. But she doesn’t realize she’s heading straight into a blizzard.
She never arrives at her destination.
Stranded in rural Maine with a dead car and broken ankle, Tegan worries she’s made a terrible mistake. Then a miracle occurs: she is rescued by a couple who offers her a room in their warm cabin until the snow clears.
At the beginning of this book series, Lucas Davenport — the good guy — wasn’t much better than the criminals he chased.
But over time he became increasingly likeable.
Night Prey (2024) is only 6th in the series. But Davenport is already showing signs of humanity.
State Investigator Meagan Connell believes that Minneapolis has a serial killer on its hands, a killer who has stepped up the frequency of his attacks. Connell is dying of cancer and is determined to catch the killer in the few weeks she has left.
Davenport is called in for his expertise in serial murder.
The BAD GUY this time is an elusive cat burglar obsessed with a woman.
It’s a gritty police procedural trying to find the villain.
The BFG (short for The Big Friendly Giant) … was ranked number 88 among all-time best children’s novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a US monthly.
Sophie, an eight-year-old girl in an orphanage, befriends a mysterious Giant, the BFG.
The 24-foot-tall giant carries her away to the land of the Giants, a place not on any map.
The BFG is a vegetarian. But his 9 neighbours are much bigger and stronger giants, who all happily eat humans every night.
Sophie persuades the BFG to approach the Queen of England for help with the other giants. They plot to imprison the hungry man-eating giants in a deep pit.
I was most entertained by Dahl’s inventive, playful use of language. He invented over 500 new words by scribbling down his words before swapping letters around and adopting spoonerisms and malapropisms.
Horror stories for kids? Yep.
His obituary in The Times was titled “Death silences Pied Piper of the macabre“.
I was interested to read about the process, complicated by ancient history.
One strength of the Catholic Church is tradition.
The big weakness is tradition. It’s very difficult to reform / improve Catholicism, though I respect Pope Francis for trying.
The Pope is dead.
Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world’s most secretive election.
They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals.
Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.
In Conclave, the hero is Cardinal Lomeli, dean of the College of Cardinals and the man responsible for presiding over the conclave. Among the papabile there is Tedesco the traditionalist, Tremblay the ambitious North American and Adeyemi the African with strong views on the role of women and gay marriage. …
Into this gathering there arrives a cardinal no one has heard of – Vincent Benítez, a cardinal in pectore, created by the pope in secret in order to protect his identity. The stage is thus set for a showdown. …
The first body is of a young woman, found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Whoever did this, Lucas knows, is pushed by brain chemistry, there is something wrong with him. This isn’t a bad love affair.
The second body is found a week later, in a farmhouse six miles south. Same condition, same display — except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two murders, nothing to indicate that the killings end here. …
A suspect emerges early: a man recently released from a prison hospital and who now seems to have cut himself free from his court-imposed ankle bracelet and disappeared. But the more Lucas investigates, the more he wonders: Is this really the man? Could he really have done this all by himself? And where has he gone to, anyway?
Michael Tanner is on his way home from a business trip when he accidentally picks up the wrong MacBook in an airport security line. He doesn’t notice the mix-up until he arrives home in Boston, but by then it’s too late. Tanner’s curiosity gets the better of him when he discovers that the owner is a US senator and that the laptop contains top secret files.
When Senator Susan Robbins realizes she’s come back with the wrong laptop, she calls her young chief of staff, Will Abbott, in a panic. …
Though I wasn’t impressed with his Nick Heller series of books, I’ll definitely be reading more Joseph Finder.
Rick McCharles 