Out at Night - Hardcover

Smith, Susan Arnout

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312368348 ISBN 13: 9780312368340

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2009

Synopsis

It’s the dead of night, and Professor Thaddeus Bartholomew is frantically crawling through a field to stay alive. With mere moments to act, he has only enough time to type out a text message—a name—before his stalker overcomes him. Later he’s found with a hole in his chest, shot with a crossbow, and burned to death.

Meanwhile, San Diego crime scene tech Grace Descanso has gone on vacation with her daughter, but the FBI feels far from guilty about interrupting them after her name turns up on the professor’s phone. Grace knows vaguely who he is, but can’t imagine why his dying act would involve her in any way—not that it matters. The FBI won’t let her walk away; she can either join the investigation or become a suspect in it. Soon, political leaders and extremists will converge at the world’s largest agricultural conference, and all signs indicate that Bartholomew’s brutal murder in a field of genetically modified soy is just the beginning of something much larger than one man’s death.

A gripping sequel to her heart-racing series debut, The Timer Game, Susan Arnout Smith’s Out at Night entangles Grace in a sweeping conspiracy that hits her dangerously close to home.

About this title

About the Author

SUSAN ARNOUT SMITH is a third-generation Alaskan whose grandparents homesteaded an island. Winner of the Stanley Drama Award and a playwright at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, she has also been a recreation director on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a television anchor in Anchorage, and an essayist for National Public Radio. She has written screenplays for TV movies, one of which was a finalist for the PEN USA West Award. She lives in Southern California with her husband. This is her third novel.

Reviews

At the start of Smith's overheated follow-up to her debut, The Timer Game, someone with a crossbow shoots an arrow into the chest of Professor Thaddeus Bartholomew, a gadfly protesting GM, or genetically modified, crops on the eve of an international agricultural convention in Palm Springs, Calif. The attacker then douses the professor with gasoline and lights a match. Alarmed by Bartholomew's murder, the FBI suspects Radical Damage, a violent protest group, has plans to disrupt the conference at its closing ceremony. Grace Descanso, who works for the San Diego police crime lab, finds various family members complicating the investigation, including her estranged Uncle Pete, an FBI special agent, and her pregnant cousin, Vonda, who's possibly involved with the radicals. In spite of the hectic pace, the precise nature of the radicals' threats is revealed too late to generate much suspense, and the wrapup is unsatisfyingly neat. Author tour. (Mar.)
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Crime-scene technician Grace Descanso’s vacation and tentative reunion with the father of her young daughter ends abruptly when she’s called into a case that starts with murder and escalates into full-blown ecoterrorism. Days before an international agriculture conference starts, a dying scientist shot with an arrow sends a message to find Grace. FBI Agent Pete Descanso, Grace’s uncle from whom she’s estranged, sends for her both to help solve the crime and to check out his daughter, who may be involved through a radical environmental group. But finding the killer begins to pale in the face of possible catastrophe at the conference and beyond, and it becomes more personal for Grace when she learns that Jeanne Bigelow, her AA sponsor who’s been like a mother to her, has a hidden past and is a prime suspect. With its chilling scenario about the potential impact of genetically modified foods, this sequel to The Timer Game (2008) effectively combines a focus on character with high-powered suspense. --Michele Leber

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312368348
• ISBN 13: 9780312368340
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304