The a List

February 25, 2019
Bestseller Jance’s disjointed 14th Ali Reynolds mystery (after 2018’s Duel to the Death) centers on the efforts of Edward Gilchrist, a disgraced California fertility doctor, to take revenge on former L.A. newscaster Ali, now the owner of a cybersecurity company in Arizona, and four others for uncovering evidence of his treating infertility with his own sperm instead of that of donors. In 2013, Gilchrist enters Folsom Prison to serve a life sentence without parole for arranging to have his wife killed before she could testify against him. With the help of a prison kingpin and the financial support of his wealthy, conniving mother, he starts to work through his so-called Annihilation List. The subsequent string of murders comes to the attention of Ali and her cybersecurity team only after a friend of hers is killed. Ali must stop Gilchrist before she becomes his next victim. Jance misses no opportunity to pad the scattered narrative with exposition, and never takes a moment to develop any emotional depth. Readers who don’t mind cartoonish characters and melodramatic action will be satisfied. Agent: Alice Volpe, Northwest Literary.

March 1, 2019
A convicted killer's list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he's already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey's son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he's inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor's medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it's done falling, he's serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who'd turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he'd hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn's place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who'd helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali's been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can't possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they'll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

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March 15, 2019
Ali Reynolds is pulled away from her Sedona cybersecurity company to Los Angeles by a story she covered years ago when she worked there as a television news anchor. When Alexandra Munsey's son was diagnosed with a kidney disorder, she went to her fertility doctor looking for a medical history on the sperm donor she and her husband had used. Dr. Edward Gilchrist was less than forthcoming. It turns out the good doctor was the biological father of quite a few of the clinic's success stories. That's not what landed him in prison, though. He was convicted of killing the ex-wife he thought was going to testify against him. Now, his wealthy mother is pulling strings on the outside to carry out her son's hit list. Which, of course, includes Ali. Series fans will enjoy revisiting Ali's early days.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)