Review by New York Times Review
Michael Robotham is one adult author you can really trust around young girls. In SAY YOU'RE SORRY (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $24.99), this Australian crime novelist assigns half the narration to Piper Hadley, who tells her story with the urgency of a latter-day Scheherazade. As we learn from her candid diary entries, Piper was abducted along with her best friend, Natasha McBain, when both were 15, and for the past three years, they've been held captive in a cellar by their kidnapper, a sexual predator they call George. Piper tries not to think too hard about the periodic visits her friend must make to George's quarters, but after Tash comes back bloodied from their latest encounter, she finds a way to escape from the cellar, promising to return with help to rescue Piper. Robotham projects an uncanny approximation of Piper's girlish voice as she shrewdly analyzes the initial reaction to their disappearance, gleaned from the newspaper and television reports shared by their captor. ("People put a shine on us that wasn't there for real, making us into the angels they wanted us to be.") And she philosophically accepts the fickle nature of their fame. ("Rumors began circulating. . . . We were promiscuous. Feral. Delinquent.") But when Tash fails to return and it's Piper's turn to go upstairs with George, her narrative takes on a tone of desperation. Joe O'Loughlin, a clinical psychologist and criminal profiler who often plays the hero in Robotham's psychological suspense thrillers, uses his share of the narrative to let us know what's happening above ground. A husband and wife are brutally murdered in their home during a whiteout blizzard. The barefoot body of a woman is found under the ice of a frozen lake. And O'Loughlin, whose stormy relationship with his own headstrong daughter is a continuing source of grief, finds himself thinking more and more about the lost girls. Robotham is a writer of many voices, sounding exactly like a spoiled teenage girl one minute and, in the next breath, exactly like a frustrated parent. And while he seems to have a lot of sympathy for the families of missing children, the dynamic that truly engages him is the one between fathers and daughters. In this story there are good fathers, bad fathers, even monstrous fathers. The daughters are no saints either. But, for all that, they can't help loving one another. "There really isn't anything gory or gruesome I've not seen or can't somehow handle," Kay Scarpetta lets it be known at the outset of THE BONE BED (Putnam, $28.95), Patricia Cornwell's 20th novel featuring her superstar forensic pathologist, who is currently serving as the chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Proving her point, the unflappable Scarpetta takes a dramatic plunge into Boston Harbor to retrieve the bound body of a woman ensnared in the same fishing line entangling a 2,500-pound leatherback turtle ("the earth's last living dinosaur") that may be 100 years old. The media glare surrounding the giant turtle also leads to an identification of the murdered woman in the harbor, but not before calling attention to two other missing women, one the wife of a billionaire industrialist on trial for her murder, the other an American paleontologist on a dinosaur dig in Canada. For once, Cornwell resists the impulse to fly her brainy sleuth out on blackops missions for the government agencies that have her on speed dial. The tight plot keeps a local focus, the disconnected deaths are neatly tied together, Scarpetta's annoying friends mainly stay out of her way, and there are plenty of stomach-churning autopsies performed with cutting-edge equipment, including one on a mummified corpse. If you're reading for credibility. Archer Mayor's police procedurals can be highly instructive about crime trends in provincial New England. PARADISE CITY (Minotaur, $25.99) suggests that its small-town crooks have graduated from marijuana nurseries and meth labs to more sophisticated criminal enterprises. Joe Gunther, the raw-boned Vermont detective in these rugged novels, finds the common element in a number of recent burglaries: all the jewelry and objets d'art seem to be finding their way to Northampton, Mass., an old manufacturing town that's been retooled as an upscale art center. As regional operations go, this crime ring (which even has a Web site, LotsforLoot.com) is way more ingenious than the usual dopesmuggling gang. The Danish authors Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis have written another disturbing exposé of social injustice in INVISIBLE MURDER (Soho Crime, $25), which makes the criminal mistreatment of Denmark's disenfranchised Roma population more visible than the authorities might wish. As a favor for a social-worker friend, a Red Cross nurse named Nina Borg travels to a suburb of Copenhagen, where she discovers about 50 Roma living without facilities in an old machine shop. Meanwhile, in Budapest, a promising law student is tossed out of school when it's revealed that he's part Roma. But the awkwardness of the authors' storytelling in this translation by Tara Chace might just cause readers to bail out before all the instances of racism are drawn together. Too many characters and subplots are introduced too quickly, yet it takes forever to turn the story over to Nina, a compassionate heroine who deserves a better chance to shine her light on the terrible things she sees. Two teenage girls have been held captive in a cellar. One has escaped. The other remains to tell us their story.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 11, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
On the same day she receives a mystifying video e-mail about an American anthropologist missing in Canada, Kay Scarpetta retrieves a woman's body from Massachusetts Bay (after disentangling it from a massive sea turtle) and testifies at the trial of a billionaire industrialist accused of murdering his missing wife. Disparate cases tend to connect in crime fiction, and soon Scarpetta with her chief investigator, Pete Marino, temporarily sidelined is searching for what her husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley, believes to be a serial killer. Unfortunately, one of the cases doesn't quite fit the pattern. And then there's Scarpetta herself, now feeling both her age and some friction in her marriage. She's gazing appreciatively at younger men, including her newly hired deputy at the Cambridge Forensic Center, Dr. Luke Zenner, while Wesley admits that his younger female partner is in love with him and has tried to lure him to bed. Which distracts Scarpetta when the killer, inevitably, targets her. Cornwell's forensics are fine, but she still seems to be struggling to recover the freshness and verve that formerly distinguished the Scarpetta series. Longtime fans may not be bothered, but others may find reading this more a duty than a pleasure. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: As the twentieth entry in the Kay Scarpetta series, this is bound to be promoted heavily. Shortcomings aside, it extends the personal stories of a handful of characters whom fans have followed for years.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Having survived brushes with ruthless killers, human monsters and treacherous colleagues of every stripe (Red Mist, 2011, etc.), forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta limps into her 20th case to encounter more of the same. Scarpetta's latest casts her as Zeno trying to overtake the tortoise. Before she can track the provenance of the video that's been emailed to her--a video apparently featuring footage of missing University of Alberta paleontologist Emma Shubert's severed ear--she has to testify, however unwillingly, for the defense in Channing Lott's trial for the murder of his vanished wife. Before she can leave for court, she has to examine the mummified remains of an unidentified woman who's been spotted in Boston Harbor--an examination that has to begin instantly, before the deterioration delayed by the corpse's long period of climate-controlled storage resumes at top speed. But before Scarpetta can get the corpse on a slab, it'll have to be gently cut loose from the leatherback turtle who's gotten tangled up with it, an animal whose endangered species status gives it priority over a mere human cadaver. The first half of this sprawling, ambitious tale may make the reader feel like Zeno as well, constantly struggling to catch up to what Scarpetta already knows about the latest round of traumas posed by her husband, Benton Wesley, her niece, Lucy Farinelli, and her investigator, Pete Marino. It's not till the second half, when Cornwell hunkers down to tie all these cases together, that excitement rises even as disbelief creeps in. An ingenious murder method, more hours in the mortuary and forensics lab than usual, an uncharacteristically muffled killer, and all the trademark battles among the regulars and every potential ally who gets in their way.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
