Inside a hostage crisis

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Karin Slaughter's latest, Indelible, features medical examiner Sara Linton in what may be her most harrowing adventure to date. It is, in fact, two stories in one: the first, a prequel to the series, takes place in 1991; the second occurs in the present day. Slaughter cuts back and forth between the two, and the suspense builds exponentially. In the prequel, Sara's planned Florida retreat with her new beau, police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, rapidly degenerates into a weekend of deception, betrayal and murder. The presumed killer is Jeffrey's boyhood friend Robert, whose account of the shooting conflicts with the evidence in several major respects. Old secrets abound, and their exposure results in mayhem. Fast-forward to 2004: Sara and Jeffrey have been married and divorced, and now hang on the horns of the remarriage dilemma. On the heels of a particularly bitter argument between the two, a pair of gunmen overruns the police station, brutally shooting down a number of townspeople and holding several more hostage, Jeffrey among them. With the aid of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Sara will attempt to infiltrate the police station and diffuse the situation before any more lives are lost. Indelible will appeal to fans of Tami Hoag and Patricia Cornwell; Slaughter's plotting is first-rate, and she has an exceptional feel for the twist ending.


Lucky in love?

Feisty California attorney Nina Reilly is back in Unlucky in Law, installment 10 of Perri O'Shaughnessy's popular series. As the story opens, Reilly has moved from Tahoe to Carmel-by-the-Sea to be with her fiancé, private investigator Paul van Wagoner. She is offered a position as second-chair defense attorney in a case involving the murder of a Russian immigrant's daughter. Her client, two-time convicted felon Stefan Wyatt, proclaims his innocence (don't they all?), and a closer look at the evidence reveals some especially shoddy investigative work prior to Reilly's involvement in the case. If convicted, Wyatt stands to serve 25 to life, as a consequence of California's Third Strike law. Unless Reilly is able to pull the proverbial rabbit from the fedora, her client is in deep trouble. Add to the soup a couple of Muscovite thugs, a radical Orthodox priest and a deft liar who may be the legitimate heir to the Romanov court (i.e., the rightful current-day Tsar of Russia), and you have a flavorful borscht indeed. Perri O'Shaugnessy, by the way, is the pseudonym of a pair of sisters, Pamela and Mary O'Shaughnessy, the first a onetime lawyer, the other an editor in a previous life. Together they have crafted some of the most entertaining legal thrillers in recent memory.


Mystery of the month

The August Tip of the Ice Pick Award goes to veteran thrillermeister Robert Ferrigno for his edgy noir mystery, The Wake-Up. Protagonist Frank Thorpe is a mostly-retired "black-ops" specialist for a government agency that doesn't officially exist. At LAX en route to a long-awaited vacation, he spots a young vendor being mistreated by an obnoxious (and obviously well-heeled) businessman. In the grand American tradition of coming to the aid of the little guy, Thorpe decides to treat the businessman to a bit of comeuppance, to give the man a "wake-up." It will be a minor interruption to Thorpe's vacation, but all things being equal, it should prove immensely satisfying. Problem is, in a Ferrigno novel, all things are never equal; when the first domino is pushed, the carefully arranged pattern goes awry remarkably quickly. The cast of villains is perhaps the best in mystery fiction so far this year: it includes a clothing magnate surf bum who doubles as a designer drug creator; his murderous (albeit dimwitted) redneck brother-in-law; an oddly angelic bio-engineered Romanian hit man and his Atkins-dieting partner in crime; and The Engineer, a sadistic international criminal who would like nothing better than to see Thorpe dead. Robert Ferrigno is in many ways the consummate author; he brings many admirable qualities to the table (plotting, characterizations, humor, tension) without any one of them jumping to the head of the line at the expense of the others. The Wake-Up stands tall in Ferrigno's fine body of work.


© 2004 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com