The dumbest of the Alex Cross series I’ve read, so far.
The novel has received a mostly negative response, and maintains a 2.5 rating (out of a possible five) on Amazon.com.[2] Several critics have attacked the story’s graphic scenes of violence and torture …
Seems Patterson REALLY wanted to draw attention to atrocities in Africa — so devised a plot to get Alex over there unofficially.
Win is the most interesting character in the Myron Bolitar series. An anti-hero.
I was quite keen to learn his backstory.
Following eleven novels in Coben’s series featuring sports agent-turned-crime solver Myron Bolitar, this is the first novel to completely feature Myron’s best friend and sidekick, the wealthy and mysterious Windsor “Win” Horne Lockwood III. …
An elderly man who appears to be a recluse and hoarder is found murdered in his luxury Manhattan apartment.
The FBI contacts Win when two items connected to the Lockwood family – an original Johannes Vermeer painting that was stolen 20 years ago and a suitcase bearing Win’s initials – are found in the apartment.
The FBI’s interest becomes clear when the victim is revealed to be Ry Strauss, one-time member of the underground group known as the Jane Street Six, who were responsible for a fire bomb attack that killed seven people in the early 1970s.
Win runs his own concurrent investigation, as he “has three things the FBI doesn’t; a personal connection to the case; an ungodly fortune; and his own unique brand of justice. …
Win’s investigation has him searching for the four remaining members of the Jane Street Six, with two known to be deceased, while he also digs into family secrets over his father’s objections.
Along the way, a vigilante act Win carried out against a basketball coach and abuser leads to repercussions, nearly costing Win his life.
The 8th book (2014) in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Deadline.
This is the one many people remember vividly.
Investigating kidnapped dogs. And a murdering School Board.
Very entertaining.
In Southeast Minnesota, down on the Mississippi, a school board meeting is coming to an end. The board chairman announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed, due to personnel issues.
“Issues” is correct. The proposal up for a vote before them is whether to authorize the killing of a local reporter. The vote is four to one in favor.
Meanwhile, not far away, Virgil Flowers is helping out a friend by looking into a dognapping, which seems to be turning into something much bigger and uglier—a team of dognappers supplying medical labs—when he gets a call from Lucas Davenport. A murdered body has been found—and the victim is a local reporter. . . .
The disappearance of a local politician’s white teenaged daughter is major news in Minnesota.
As a huge manhunt is launched to find her, Cork O’Connor’s grandson stumbles across the shallow grave of a young Ojibwe woman—but nobody seems that interested. Nobody, that is, except Cork and the newly formed Iron Lake Ojibwe Tribal Police.
As Cork and the tribal officers dig into the circumstances of this mysterious and grim discovery, they uncover a connection to the missing teenager. And soon, it’s clear that Cork’s grandson is in danger of being the killer’s next victim.
He became intrigued by researching the Ojibwe culture and weaving the information into his books.
His books are set in and around Native American reservations. The main character, Cork O’Connor, is part Ojibwe and part Irish.
An oil pipeline is being built through a sacred Ojibwe site in Minnesota’s north woods. Construction is at a standstill due to the Ojibwe/Anishinaabe protests. Tension in the community.
Maxwell Broadbent, an eccentric rich man with terminal cancer, has spent his entire life collecting valuable art and treasures from around the world.
One day, he writes a letter to his three sons telling them to … find his tomb, promising that the son that finds his tomb will receive all his treasures—worth approximately $300 million. …
Tom is the only one who is not interested in the treasure at all, until he is approached by a beautiful ethnopharmacologist named Sally Colorado, who informs … that his father tried to present an ancient Mayan Codex to a museum for translation years back, only to be rejected since no one knew ancient Mayan at the time.
Years later, after ancient Mayan has been deciphered, Sally and her fiancé, Yale professor Julian Clyve, have deduced from a single surviving photograph that the Codex may contain many ancient Mayan herbal remedies that, if studied and reproduced in present times, could revolutionize medicine and cure many diseases.
Tom reluctantly agrees to help her, and they eventually recruit a witty tribal elder named Don Alfonso, accompanied by the brother trackers Pingo and Chori.
I enjoy the smart, entertaining dialogue. There is a lot of dark humour.
Some of the most popular characters from past books make an appearance, including a Corsican goat. 😀
A brutal murder, a missing masterpiece, a mystery only Gabriel Allon can solve …
Art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into London to attend a reception at the Courtauld Gallery celebrating the return of a stolen self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh. But when an old friend from the Devon and Cornwall Police seeks his help with a baffling murder investigation, he finds himself pursuing a powerful and dangerous new adversary.
The victim is Charlotte Blake, a celebrated professor of art history from Oxford who spends her weekends in the same seaside village where Gabriel once lived under an assumed identity. Her murder appears to be the work of a diabolical serial killer who has been terrorizing the Cornish countryside. …
Gabriel soon discovers that Professor Blake was searching for a looted Picasso worth more than a $100 million, and he takes up the chase for the painting as only he can—with six Impressionist canvases forged by his own hand and an unlikely team of operatives that includes a world-famous violinist, a beautiful master thief, and a lethal contract killer turned British spy.
Silva writes lying on the floor. With pencils. On yellow legal pads.
Baring-Gould is a real person who inspired this book. He wrote “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and hundreds of other publications. Something of an investigator like Holmes.
The audio book is posted on YouTube. You can listen free.
Jackson Lamb is one of the great characters of fiction, all time.
… an unsparing look at the corrupt web of media, global finance, spycraft, and politics that power our modern world.
“This is a darker, scarier Herron. The gags are still there but the satire’s more biting.
The privatization of a secret service op and the manipulation of news is relevant and horribly credible.”—Ann Cleeves, author of the Vera Stanhope series
At Slough House—MI5’s London depository for demoted spies—Brexit has taken a toll. The “slow horses” have been pushed further into the cold, Slough House has been erased from official records, and its members are dying in unusual circumstances, at an unusual clip. No wonder Jackson Lamb’s crew is feeling paranoid. But are they actually targets?
With a new populist movement taking hold of London’s streets and the old order ensuring that everything’s for sale to the highest bidder, the world’s a dangerous place for those deemed surplus. Jackson Lamb and the slow horses are in a fight for their lives …
Rick McCharles 