Review by New York Times Review
Thomas Perry, that smiling sadist who gets his kicks from outfoxing readers, is at his wicked best in strip (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26). Like any self-respecting gangland thriller, this witty specimen has a cast of touchy mobsters killing one another over money and turf and petty grievances. But because a devious mind is manipulating the genre conventions - allowing unpredictable characters rather than precision-tooled action to drive his story - the rules of the game are constantly changing. The initial setup couldn't be sweeter. Manco Kapak, who owns some strip clubs in Los Angeles and moves a little money for a major drug distributor, is personally affronted when a masked gunman holds him up while he is making a bank deposit, robbing him of a night's take. The money is nothing, but the insult cuts deep, and in short order the hunt is on for an out-of-towner named Joe Carver who had nothing to do with the crime but can't persuade the irascible Kapak to call off the dogs. Once we're comfortable with these ground rules (innocent man, up against a ruthless gangster, using his wits to stay alive) Perry pulls a switch. Although blameless, Carver is anything but harmless, and after failing to negotiate a truce with his enemy, he sets out to destroy him. Kapak, meanwhile, becomes more sympathetic by the minute, mainly by treating everyone on his staff, from trigger-happy bodyguards to weary strippers, with uncommon decency. By the time Perry polishes up his portrait, this aging and exhausted skin merchant resembles an honorable but fatally flawed king who stands to lose his entire realm because of a tragic error in judgment. And the wonderful characters keep on coming, activated by greed and open to opportunity: the faithful functionary who finally initiates a plan of his own; the superstitious killers who suspect that the boss is under a curse; the charmed robber who loses his luck when he hooks up with a wild babe thirsting for adventure; the bigamous police detective desperate for a way to finance the college educations of his five children; the nice waitress who could be Kapak's last chance for love. And let's not forget that man of mystery, Joe Carver. They may all start off as familiar types, but once Perry lets them loose, they refuse to go back in the box. At one time, part of Kansas was under a vast inland sea "with prehistoric sharks and other seafaring creatures," Nancy Pickard tells us in THE SCENT OF RAIN AND LIGHTNING (Ballantine, $25). Today only a towering formation known as Testament Rocks marks the spot. This is where Jody Linder comes to commune with her mother, who disappeared when Jody was 3 - on the same night the child's father was shot to death. After the no-good ranch hand who went to prison for the crime is released, Jody's uncles try to soften the blow, but it's far too late. The symbolism gets a bit heavy, with Jody likening herself to an amateur archaeologist engaged in the "macabre hobby" of digging around Testament Rocks for her mother's bones. Still, Pickard has the storytelling gift. Working with dramatic descriptions of the deep darkness of the plains and the pounding storms that turn the skies black, she offers a sober account of the cattle-ranching families who have survived for generations by keeping their secrets close and their guns handy. The plot structure of John Sandford's 20th Lucas Davenport novel, STORM PREY (Putnam, $27.95), is a beautiful thing to behold. The sturdy scaffolding, designed to support two interconnecting story lines, allows readers to follow both the misadventures of an incompetent gang of thieves, who inadvertently kill a pharmacy worker when they break into a hospital to steal drugs, and a complicated medical procedure to separate conjoined twins. Bridging these narratives is the panicked thieves' scheme to eliminate the only witness to their crime, a surgeon on the operating team who happens to be married to the detective charged with solving the case. But the pretty construction job isn't all bricks and mortar. Sandford invests the villains with enough psychotic quirks to keep the action fast, jumpy and violent. And while none of the white hats can match the perverse appeal of a 20-year-old killer biker whose crazy father named him after a 1982 Chevy Caprice, that delicate operation is every bit as intense as all the other daredevil stunts in this manhunt. Nicci Gerrard and Sean French normally turn out sophisticated psychological thrillers when they write as Nicci French. But they mistake mannerism for cleverness in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR (Minotaur, $25.99), a labored exercise in split-focus storytelling. Chopped up into scenes designated "Before" and "After," the narrative opens with a music teacher named Bonnie standing over a corpse and invites us to guess the identity of the victim and the role Bonnie played in his demise. There's a certain awkward charm to the "Before" scenes, in which she assembles a group of musical misfits to play in a bluegrass band, but not enough to keep disbelief at bay. Not when the heroine asks a not-so-close friend to help her get rid of the body and the dialogue goes like this. Heroine: "Do you want to know what happened?" Friend: "Do you want to tell me?" Heroine: "Not yet." Friend: "Then wait." To which the only reader response must be: "Well, take your time, ladies, and turn out the lights when you're done." Thomas Perry's thriller has a cast of touchy gangsters killing one another over money and turf.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 23, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The new thriller by the writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French is a cleverly constructed story of sex, death, and duplicity. Bonnie's secret lover is dead in Bonnie's apartment. Panic stricken, she enlists the aid of her best friend to dispose of the body, hoping the whole situation will simply go away. It doesn't, and soon Bonnie is ensnared in a web of deceit that threatens to destroy her. French takes some big risks here. The protagonist, Bonnie, is not the most likable person (What can you expect from someone who gets rid of the body of her dead lover?); if she weren't so compellingly drawn, we might abandon her and the book. Riskier even than an unlikable central character is the book's structure. French tells the story from two angles, in chapters titled Before and After : we follow, in small chapters, the events leading up to the man's death and the events following it, alternating between past and present, the story assembling itself like a rather sordid jigsaw puzzle. French doesn't even tell us who the victim is until about a quarter of the way through the book, and even then, we don't know how he died. Narrated in a typical linear fashion, the story might seem familiar and perhaps even predictable, but telling it in this exceedingly clever manner works perfectly; in fact, it's downright brilliant and illustrates why the Nicci French novels are so popular: they don't simply tell good stories; they tell them in ways that keep readers perpetually on their toes.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this pitch-perfect thriller from British author French, the husband-wife team of Sean French and Nicci Gerard, band singer Bonnie finds her "summer fling" boyfriend and fellow band member, Hayden, dead on the floor of a friend's London apartment. She proceeds to hide the corpse and obliterate every sign of her presence at the crime scene. This course of action is, predictably, full of pitfalls. Hayden's well-known involvement with other women could have provided Bonnie a motive for murder. To complicate matters, at least one more person appears to have altered the crime scene. Told in a tantalizing series of flashbacks, the narrative draws you into the inner world of the protagonist, a "tough cookie" who nevertheless endures a relationship that's so abusive the reader is never quite sure that she did not, in fact, snap. French (Until It's Over) takes the time to tease out individual characters to a degree seldom seen in crime fiction, saving the final plot twist for the last page. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
