Disturbance

April 25, 2011
Psychopath Nicholas Parrish, who almost cost Irene Kelly her life in the Edgar-winning Bones, returns in Burke's overwrought 11th thriller featuring the California newspaper reporter (after 2006's Kidnapped). When bodies start popping up bearing Parrish's elaborate moth designs and his online devoteesâthe Mothsâbecome more active, Kelly fears the imprisoned Parrish is planning a comeback, having made a miraculous recovery from a spinal cord injury. Life at work is far from pleasant, as her paper, Las Piernas News Express, struggles to survive in a world that relies less on print media, forcing Kelly to make a radical career choice. Much of the suspense dissipates as Burke intercuts Kelly's chapters with those focusing on Parrish and three men the reader soon learns are half-brothers and sons of the serial killer. The stage is inevitably set for Parrish's escape and rematch with Kelly, familiar territory from Bones that does little to flex Kelly's formidable investigative skills or Burke's narrative ones.

April 15, 2011

A brood of serial killers makes a family business out of stalking reporter Irene Kelly.

A perennial star with the Las Piernas (California) News Express, Irene Kelly now finds herself facing eclipse, the trouble coming from two directions. First, the embattled News Express, long engaged in a bitter war of attrition, the same one being waged by newspapers nationwide, puts out a final edition, converting Irene and her colleagues into unhappy members of the nonworking press. A tough deal for someone like Irene who loves her job so much that the loss of it is in a sense a small death. But death by metaphor is only that, after all, while real death—that which has been promised her by notorious serial killer Nick Parrish—is an over-and-done-with proposition, the stuff of obits and requiems. Irene has a history with Parrish, the kind that doesn't bear thinking about, except that she does think about it, recalling a robotic monster who kills as if assembled for no other purpose. Her experience with Parrish has been hands-on: his hands on her throat, resulting in trauma she relives in shivery nightmares whenever things go bump in the night. She'd been lucky to wriggle free of him, an escape so narrow she can't quite believe in its permanence. Yes, she knows that Parrish, his body wracked by serious injuries to head and spine, is locked away behind prison bars presumably forever—a life sentence, no possibility of parole—but still she worries. The worry will intensify exponentially when she learns about those three chips off the old block.

Even Burke, accomplished thrillermeister that she is (The Messenger, 2008, etc.), can't get blood from a stone, or wring a nuance from your basic, warmed-over serial killer, a prototype well past its sell date. Her next will be better.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

May 1, 2011
In Bones (2000), investigative reporter Irene Kelly nearly lost her life at the hands of Nick Parrish, an accused serial killer who engineered an escape from custody and came after her. Now Irene is about to be plunged back into Parrishs hellish world. His sons masterminded a successful plot to spring Nick from prison, and, loose again, he picks up where he left off all those years ago, with an all-consuming passion to end Irenes life. While tautly written and suspenseful, Disturbance feels a bit too much like a retread of Bones, with the same villain, same hero, same basic set-up. On the other hand, Nick seems more real this timein Bones, he was rather a Hannibal Lecter spin-offand Irene is, as before, a strong, likable protagonist. The conclusion seems to put an end to the Nick Parrish saga, yet Burke has left a little wiggle room for a further follow-up. The Kelly novels have a devoted following, and its been five years since the last one, so expect considerable interest.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)