“Perry succeeds with Dead Aim on all fronts. It’s both chilling and absorbing, the right mix in a thriller.” –New York Daily News Robert Mallon has lived for ten quiet years in affluent Santa Barbara, California, when an encounter on a beach with a mysterious young woman shatters his peaceful, c...
The weakest entry thus far in the Jane Whitefield series. We've seen time and time again how resourceful Jane can be in anticipating the opposition's actions and evading them - there's lots more of that here, albeit almost too routine by now. Jane's acceptance of a new runner is almost perfunct...
I rarely purchase a novel on the basis of the title alone, especially when I haven’t heard of the author. Yet, I picked up Death Benefits thinking that it was merely going to be a murder mystery based on insurance fraud and glanced at the back cover. The back cover did nothing to dissuade me of t...
I like Thomas Perry as a writer (I mean, as a writer of dialogue and description, and as a pacer of a story) and in this book he starts to acknowledge some of the logistical changes in the world. For example, in this novel, published in 1995 originally, the heroine needs to create credit cards to...
My library is doing a discussion series on "Native American Mysteries" so that's how I was introduced to this book and this author. Thank you, Parsons Public Library! It was a very interesting read that will have me looking for the rest of the series.Jane Whitefield, a member of the Seneca trib...
What a terrific story! What an exciting book! Well written! Well plotted! Suspenseful! Surprising! The best Thomas Perry novel I've read!This is the fourth book in the Jane Whitfield series. Jane is now married to Dr. Carey McKinnon and is no longer "guiding" fugitives and helping them dis...
They got into the black Volvo that was left and drove out of the gate at the end of their driveway. They had bought this house in Van Nuys while they were still police officers.Ronnie had noticed the house while she was patrolling the old, quiet neighborhood. She had driven past it many times, un...
Whenever they lost the rhythm, their bodies stopped moving, and they looked like marionettes—not still, but sort of hanging from invisible threads until they caught the beat again and let it animate them. Usually he fled the music and kept his eyes off the girls after their first day on the job. ...
It was all desert now, the earth a dusty brown with slabs and outcroppings of gray rock visible in places where it broke through the thin, powdery covering of soil. The sky behind his head was a glowing pink already, but the high rocks ahead were still in the strong, direct rays of the late-after...
She had borrowed a table beneath the whiteboard where someone had drawn a crude diagram of Mary Tilson’s apartment, with a body that looked like a gingerbread man. She shut the sounds of ringing telephones and the voices of the detectives out of her mind, opened the file, and looked at each of th...
Christine stared at the clock and waited, trying to prepare herself for Ruby's arrival, and the conversation that was sure to come with it. She had been persuaded that Ruby wasn't evil. Ruby wasn't cruel or spiteful like Christine's stepmother, Delia. She was just crazy, deluded into thinking tha...
Jerry Hobart wore a black baseball cap with the brim pulled low above his eyes as he walked along the side of the office building. Security cameras were always mounted high, partly to give them an unobstructed view, and partly to keep them out of reach. He didn’t have any confidence in his abilit...
Elizabeth walked into her office at the Justice Department. She wanted to spend the two hours before anyone else arrived getting caught up on the mail Geoff had left for her. The two hours before the phones started ringing would give her a chance to learn what she had missed and to find out what ...
He remembered Eddie waking him up in the middle of the night in a hotel in Milwaukee. At first the boy had been terrified because he thought the only reason to get up in the dark was that the police had somehow found out about the man Eddie had killed by the lake. His name had been “Good Eye” Fra...
Felker broke the silence. "Should we leave some money to pay for all the food and stuff?" "No," she said. "There are rules about hospitality. Some time I’ll give Mattie a present." "Like you did Wendell?" "Yes." "I know this is kind of an odd question, but what would happen if we just stayed here...
It was just noon . "I'm sorry, but there's no dial on this phone. Can you call the airline and ask them to get him to a phone? It could be important." She was glad she'd said "could be." Her control was coming back. "Yes. If we locate him I'll ring you in the lab." The telephone rang again in a f...
She dialed the cell phone number of her old college friend Allison. “Hello?” Jane could hear the familiar melodious voice, almost see the blond hair and the long, graceful neck. Allison didn’t look or sound like a trial lawyer. “Hi, Allison. It’s me...
Jane woke up and saw that a new man was beside her, wearing a surgical mask, headgear, and gloves, using a pair of curved bandage scissors to cut along the outer seam of her pants. A doctor. He pulled back the flap of fabric and examined her wound for a few seconds, then began to talk to the ma...
Dominic Hallkyn played back the voicemail on his telephone while he took off his sport coat and hung it up to dry in the laundry room. The smell of rain on tweed was one that he knew some people might say was his smell, the smell of an English professor. The coats—tweed or finer-spun wool in the ...