Gone Cold

June 15, 2015
Simon Fisk’s tragic back story propels Corleone’s uneven third thriller featuring the Washington, D.C., PI who specializes in cases involving parents who abduct their own children (after 2014’s Payoff). Flashbacks to 12 years earlier detail the events surrounding the kidnapping of Simon’s six-year-old daughter, Hailey, from the backyard of their Georgetown house. After the passage of so much time, Simon is stunned to get word from a friend that a woman wanted for murder in Ireland may be Hailey. Corleone lets the reader know early on that Simon’s wife (and Hailey’s mother), Tasha, killed herself out of guilt after the kidnapping, so that by the time the flashbacks reach her suicide, it comes across as anticlimactic. Just before he flies to Ireland, Simon learns that his estranged sister, Tuesday, who’s the ex-wife of an Interpol agent, is involved in the murder investigation. Such a contrivance does nothing to enhance the emotional impact of the most important case of Simon’s career. Agent: Robin Rue, Writers House.

June 15, 2015
Former U.S. Marshal Simon Fisk goes in search of the daughter whose abduction 12 years ago started his second career as the Finder. The reason Simon has spent those intervening years looking for other people's children (Good as Gone, 2013, etc.) instead of his own is that he was convinced that Hailey was as dead as Tasha, the wife who took an overdose of sleeping pills after the FBI couldn't recover the 6-year-old she left alone for a moment in her Georgetown backyard. But when Simon's consultant hacker, Kati Sheffield, sends him a computer-generated picture of Hailey at 18 along with a photo of a real-life woman the Garda are seeking on suspicion of stabbing Dublin private eye Elijah Welker to death with a Guinness bottle, he can't resist Kati's suggestion that the two images look an awful lot alike. Next thing you know, he's at the Dublin airport shaking hands with DCI Damon Ashdown, the first of many actors who'll be playing double roles in a world in which, as Simon soon learns, "British gangsters do things differently." The trail of the maybe-Hailey takes Simon and Ashdown and Zohanna Carlyle, a 40-something wild child who turns out to have close ties to both of them, from Dublin to Glasgow to Liverpool to London, with Simon dispensing condign justice to any miscreants who scurry across their path along the way, until he finally confronts an East End kidnapper better armed and better prepared for their meeting than Simon but still gobsmacked by the climactic surprise Simon has in store for him. Densely plotted, replete with violent incident, and strenuously uncomplicated in its moral sympathies from beginning to end.

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June 1, 2015
It's been more than a decade since Simon Fisk's daughter was abducted and his wife committed suicide. Now Fisk, a former U.S. marshal who hires himself out as a freelance investigator specializing in finding missing children, has a chance to find out what happened to his own little girl. It starts when he finds a tantalizing clue that, after all these years, his daughter might still be alive but in a world of trouble. Corleone's prose is lean, his plotting tight, his characters vividly drawn. There's plenty of action and violence, but, considering the story the author is telling, it's all completely appropriate; and the pace is so fast that the violence is often over before we've really begun processing it. Fisk is one of the more interesting series leads in the contemporary-thriller genre, a man who's so guilt-ridden over his own daughter's abduction that he's compelled to help other parents in similar situations. Will he finally find some measure of peace here? Stay tuned.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)