Say Nothing

Starred review from January 9, 2017
Shamus Award–winner Parks’s excellent domestic thriller credibly portrays a family under severe stress. Federal judge Scott Sampson’s tranquil and fulfilling personal life in rural tidewater Virginia with his wife, Alison, and twin six-year-olds, Sam and Emma, is shattered when someone impersonating Alison abducts Sam and Emma from their school. The kidnappers insist that Scott say nothing to anyone and that he await instructions about the impending sentencing of a minor drug dealer whose history merits severe punishment. The orders that Scott eventually receives threaten his professional position and prove to be but the prelude to extortion regarding another case with even greater consequences. The tension the catastrophe causes in Scott and Alison’s marriage is palpable, and Parks (The Fraud and five other Carter Ross mysteries) makes even Scott’s most paranoid suspicions reasonable in the circumstances. Veteran genre readers may anticipate some of the surprises, but they’ll still find themselves on pins and needles awaiting the reveals. Five-city author tour. Agent: Alice Martell, Martell Agency.

Starred review from January 1, 2017
A Virginia judge's 6-year-old twins are kidnapped by someone who wants to influence an important ruling he's soon to make--and doesn't mind putting him through the emotional wringer in the process.The abduction has all the hallmarks of a professional job. Someone convincingly impersonating Alison Sampson picks up Sam and Emma from their Montessori school in a vehicle that looks just like hers, transfers the children to another car a discreet distance away, and texts Scott Sampson to warn him to say nothing until he receives further instructions. These come in the form of a series of directives about how to conduct himself in the matter of Rayshaun Skavron, an excruciatingly unremarkable midlevel drug dealer. Sampson's dismay over the widening gap between how he's commanded to act and how he thinks he ought to be acting is matched by his increasingly frantic attempts to keep his dilemma secret from the police, the U.S. Marshals, even Alison's family members. Every step he takes enmeshes him even more deeply in danger from his boss's boss, from influential congressmen, from predatory online newshounds, and of course from the criminals themselves, who demonstrate early and often that they're not afraid to hurt his children to keep him in line. Parks (The Fraud, 2015, etc.) dispenses plot twists with a poisoned eyedropper, sparing no detail as Sampson describes his pain, his increasingly paranoid suspicions of people he'd been trusting for years with secrets now grown too hot to handle, and his supremely frustrating inability to take the direct counteractions that he gradually becomes convinced are absolutely necessary. The nerve-shredding never lets up for a minute as Parks picks you up by the scruff of the neck, shakes you vigorously, and repeats over and over again till a climax so harrowing that you'll be shaking with gratitude that it's finally over.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 15, 2016
Shamus, Nero, and Lefty Award winner Parks opens here with Judge Scott Sampson receiving a text from wife April that she'll pick up their six-year-old twins at swimming. But April never sent that text. With a five-city tour.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016
Parks' legal thriller gets off to a roaring start, plunking us immediately in the middle of things. Before we know who the hero is, we're bystanders in a plot to kidnap his two young children. The hero's identity becomes clear as we learn what the kidnappers are up to. Scott Sampson is a federal judge, and his children will be hurt unless he jiggers the verdict in a case he's hearing involving a lowlife drug pusher. Sampson makes an unusual lead in a genre that is often about lawyers slugging it out while a judge unleashes thunderbolts from Olympus. Here the setting is Olympus, and the thriller plot becomes an exercise in the manipulation of power. Sampson's decisions can make millionaires richer or send them to the poorhouse, and nobody is free of suspicion. Not even his wife. Readers may find credulity stretched a bit, as when the judge sneaks gun parts into the courthouse under his robe, and legal matters are resolved with gunfire. But we're here for the action, too, and Parks comes through.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)