Inherit the Dead

August 19, 2013
Despite the usual serial-novel pitfalls, C.J. Box, Lawrence Block, Mary Higgins Clark, Charlaine Harris, Val McDermid, and the 15 other distinguished crime authors who each contribute a chapter to this team project succeed in fashioning an engaging and cohesive plot. Each author maintains his or her distinctive style and storytelling approach. Marcia Clark’s offering is a mini–legal thriller, for example, while Heather Graham’s is heavy on the romance. Wealthy Julia Drusilla hires former NYPD homicide cop Pericles “Perry” Christo to find her missing 20-year-old daughter, Angelina, who’s set to inherit a fortune. The trail to Angel, as her family calls her, twists from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to the Hamptons and Brooklyn. Everyone in Angel’s life has an ulterior motive, including her father, boyfriend, and best friend. The chapters move seamlessly as clues and storylines set up by one author are expanded by the next. Royalties in excess of editor and contributor compensations go to Safe Horizon, America’s largest provider of services for domestic violence victims.

September 1, 2013
Although it's not a sequel to 2011's No Rest for the Dead, this novel-by-committee is a very good follow-up. Twenty writersamong them such notables as Billingham, Box, Bruen, Connolly, and McDermidcombine forces to tell the story of private investigator Perry Christo, a former NYPD homicide cop who's hired by a society woman to find her missing daughter, Angel, who doesn't know that she's about to become a fabulously wealthy heiress. But that will only happen if Angel signs some documents on her twenty-first birthday, which means Perry is operating on a short deadline. Adopting a conventional PI format, the book makes a few nods to classics of the genre (a character named Elisha Hook, for example, is a clear reference to actor Elisha Cook, Jr., who appeared in The Maltese Falcon). There are some stylistic variations between the 20 authorsJohn Connolly doesn't sound like Charlaine Harrisbut, for the most part, the story moves as though there were a single hand on the tiller. Not merely a genre curiosity, the book is a well-told mystery that stands on its own two (or 40) feet.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)