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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

More returning favorites @ your library

Quinn by Iris Johansen

Publishers Weekly -
Bestseller Johansen's thrilling second entry (after Eve) in a special trilogy featuring forensic sculptor Eve Duncan finds Eve at the hospital bedside of her severely injured longtime lover, FBI agent Joe Quinn. The story flashes back to Joe and Eve's first meeting, when he arrives at her Atlanta doorstep to investigate the disappearance of Bonnie, her seven-year-old daughter. While Eve devotes herself to the search for Bonnie, she also joins Joe in his quest for clues in the mysterious disappearances of other children. Joe hopes that their friendship, based on mutual respect and honesty, will lead to more. As Eve seeks relentlessly to find closure in Bonnie's disappearance, she deliberately puts herself in harm's way to lure the killer connected with the missing children out in the open. Suspense kicks into high gear as the killer strikes very close to Eve. As the novel fast forwards to a present-day search for another killer, the pulse-pounding pace will leave readers breathlessly anticipating the final installment. 




The Silent Girl by Tess Gerritsen

Kirkus Reviews -
Paired for the 10th time, Rizzoli (homicide cop) and Isles (forensic pathologist) learn that in Boston's Chinatown, revenge is a dish served sweet & sour.

They find the hand first, neatly severed, on a quiet street in the heart of Chinatown. On a nearby rooftop, they find the rest of her: Jane Doe, young, auburn-haired, dressed in ninja black, completely gorgeous and, of course, extremely dead. It takes a while for Detective Jane Rizzoli and her Boston PD colleagues to identify her. As it happens, however, who she was and what she was up to turns out to be less important than where she ended—at the site of a small, innocuous Chinese restaurant called the Red Phoenix. Innocuous, except for the fact that 19 years earlier mass murder exploded on its premises. The cook, Wu Weimin, an illegal from China, suddenly berserk, pulled a gun, shot James Fang, a waiter, three customers and finally himself. Or so the story went. Now fault lines are becoming apparent. When Rizzoli finds herself eye to eye with Iris Fang, widow of the slain James, the holes deepen. Iris, Jane realizes at once, is extraordinary—and ferocious. In her 50s, the owner of a martial-arts academy, she carries herself like a queen, with something dark and resolute in her gaze that in the right circumstances could be terrifying. And she makes it clear that she has good and sufficient reasons for not believing Wu Weimin could ever have murdered her husband. Meanwhile, Dr. Maura Isles, preparing to conduct the post mortem on Jane Doe, has good and sufficient reasons for being distracted. Do these explain a developing rift in the long-standing, mutually appreciative team of Rizzoli and Isles (Ice Cold, 2010, etc.). In any event, is the rift irreparable?
The ending is way over the top, the prose occasionally purple-tinged, but Gerritsen is a hardscrabble plotter, and much of what she does is compelling.






Victory and Honor by W. E. B. Griffin and William E. Butterworth IV

Publishers Weekly -
Diehard fans will best appreciate Griffin's slow-moving sixth Honor Bound novel, which picks up where The Honor of Spies (2009), also co-written with son Butterworth, left off in the spring of 1945. Lt. Col. Cletus Frade of the OSS, besides trying to prevent Nazis from fleeing to Argentina, is concerned with the survival of the soon-to-be-disbanded OSS and increasing tension with the U.S.S.R. The action-starved plot takes nearly 100 pages to get underway, and when it does, the drama is sporadic, choppy, and interrupted by lots of macho camaraderie. An intriguing subplot mentioned early on—a rogue Nazi U-boat that escaped Allied detection and is now chugging toward Japan with atomic secrets on board—goes nowhere. Frade, for his part, is his usual pushy, smart-alecky self and most likely destined to be a higher-up in the OSS's successor, the CIA. Techno-thriller fans will relish the detailed descriptions of weapons and aircraft.

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