Icarus

July 9, 2001
From ex-Villard publisher Peter Gethers and mystery writer David Handler, the pseudonymous duo who penned Gideon
(1999), comes this overwritten yarn about a restaurateur It seems incredible that flaws such as meandering POV and lapses into journalistic (omniscient) expository asides could come from such well-versed professionals. However, readers who suffer through the sluggish first 100 pages will be rewarded to find that the novel eventually takes hold and moves briskly forward. Fatherless 10-year-old Jack Keller watches a madman hurl his mother out of a Manhattan skyscraper window and is saved from the same fate by his wannabe stepfather, a successful butcher who takes him in. At 20, Jack meets Caroline, a drop-dead gorgeous Virginia belle at Columbia University. They marry and open Jack's, a trendy New York City eatery. In four years, they own branches in Chicago, L.A., Miami and Paris. Unable to have children, they adopt Kid, a charismatic youth who, on his way to athletic fame at St. John's University, suddenly vanishes. To get on with her life, Caroline goes to hometown Charlottesville to open a restaurant. On opening day, she is brutally murdered by a masked man who also wounds Jack so badly he is left in a wheelchair. Soon the chimerical Kid shows up with a degree in physical therapy and gets Jack back on his feet. But Kid doesn't last long. When his leap from his penthouse is ruled suicide, Jack knows he must get to the bottom of the chain of deaths, no matter what the cost. Spoiled by an hors d'oeuvre tray of twists, a buffet of subplots and a glut of trivia, this chiller is plagued by the same flaws as the overstuffed (but bestselling) Gideon.

May 1, 2001
The author's follow-up to " Gideon "(1999) is a neat thriller that keeps readers wondering what the heck is going on. When he was 10 years old, Jack Keller saw his mother murdered, tossed out a seventeenth-floor window. Three decades later, he's happily married, about to open the latest in a string of successful restaurants; then his wife is murdered during a robbery--and thrown out a window. Jack sets out to find his wife's killer and discovers that someone seems to be moving just slightly ahead of him, anticipating his moves. This is a much better novel than " Gideon," deeper and better written, with characters that are much more lifelike and memorable. The story is certainly unpredictable; readers will have a hard time figuring out who's doing what to whom before the author is ready to tell them. Some of the lengthier narrative passages seem padded, as though the author were afraid his book wouldn't be quite long enough, but overall this is a good, solid thriller that should have wide appeal.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)