The First Victim - Hardcover

Pearson, Ridley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786864400 ISBN 13: 9780786864409

Publisher: Hyperion, 1999

Synopsis

When a female reporter disappears--purportedly at the hands of the Chinese Triad--while investigating a story on illegal aliens, Lou Boldt and John LaMoia of the Seattle Police Department embark on an investigation that leads them from Seattle's docklands to the offices of the INS in search of answers.

About this title

About the Author

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning co-author, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and the Sword of Mercy, Escape From the Carnivale, Cave of the Dark Wind, Blood Tide, and Science Fair. In addition to Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers: Disney in Shadow, and Kingdom Keepers: Power Play, he is also the author of the young adult thrillers Steel Trapp: The Challenge and Steel Trapp: The Academy. He has written more than twenty best-selling crime novels including Killer View and Killer Weekend. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.

Reviews

Impeccably paced, beautifully observed and moving with a crescendo of suspense, this is another thoughtful and exciting Seattle-based police thriller from Pearson (The Pied Piper), whose skill at maintaining a balance between the narrative thrust of his plot and the personal lives of his characters makes him a top-notch practitioner of the genre. We learn just enough about Lt. Lou Boldt's current situation to realize that his recent promotion has had mixed benefits: he misses street work and bends the rules to get out from behind his desk. We also discover that his wife Liz's apparent remission from cancer has created some domestic tensionAshe credits her good results to faith; he can't quite make the same leapAand that financial pressure caused by the loss of her income has made him think about leaving the police force. We acquire this information gradually, as naturally as we would in real life, while being swept along through a heartbreaking narrative that involves illegal Chinese immigrant women being smuggled into Seattle in cargo containers. The story becomes a crusade for two sharp and ambitious female journalistsAlocal TV superstar Stevie McNeal and Melissa Chow, the young Chinese woman McNeal's father adopted, and whom Stevie calls "Little Sister." Lieutenant Boldt and his unusually well-defined team become involved when Melissa goes underground as an illegal and then disappears. Bodies of several Chinese women are found in a public graveyard, the "first victims" of a particularly vicious gang of smugglers. As one of Boldt's colleagues explains to McNeal, "The first victim is generally the one that is handled carelessly." Like all of Pearson's insights into the minds of criminals, cops and citizens, this one is strong, subtle and full of resonance. Atmospheric descriptions of Seattle and some fascinating forensic evidence add texture to a riveting story. $250,000 ad/promo. (July) FYI: The mass market edition of The Pied Piper, released simultaneously, will carry a teaser chapter from The First Victim.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The smuggling of illegal aliens may be big business, but it makes for a surprisingly flat thriller for Seattle Police Lt. Lou Boldt (The Pied Piper, 1998, etc.). Delayed and threatened by a Pacific typhoon, the container ship Visage loses one of its containers overboard. When the Coast Guard picks it up, the officers on the sceneincluding Boldt, his Crimes Against Persons successor Sgt. John LaMoia, and INS agent Brian Coughlieopen it to find nine Chinese women sealed inside, together with the corpses of three others dead of hunger, thirst, and fever. While the Seattle cops and the INS gear up for another of Pearson's trademark jurisdictional scuffles, Channel 4 news anchor Stevie McNeal is persuading her adoptive sister, freelance reporter Melissa Chow, to follow a slender lead to the location of the sweatshops and brothels that the illegals were bound for. But the trail Melissa follows turns unexpectedly hot, and she suddenly decides to go deep undercover, passing herself off as another enslaved immigrant in the sweatshop she's found. As days pass without any word from Melissa, Boldt's leads start to die: the captain of the Visage, a construction-gear manager who knew too much about the unloading of the ship, and finally the bent state employee whose suspicious spending patterns had given Stevie her first promise of a story. Meantime, Boldt, still chafing behind the desk he's been promoted to, has nothing better to do than keep interviewing Mama Lu, doyenne of the Chinese business community, and get maddeningly delphic responses. Pearson keeps spicing the pot with interspersed announcements (``Friday, August 28: 11 Days Missing'') and flashbacks to Stevie's childhood with her Little Sister, but never makes Melissa, or the traffic in illegals, seem worth ruining your manicure. Not even Pearson's niftiest action sequences can make up for the ho-hum forensics, the colorless villain, and the absence of any real urgency in the rescue. The master of the big-league police thriller has struck out in his own park. ($250,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Pearson's Lou Boldt series continues to meld the small-scale, detail-driven precision of the best procedurals with the large-canvas, screw-tightening suspense of such high-concept thrillers as Silence of the Lambs. This time, recently promoted Seattle Police Lieutenant Boldt finds himself confined to a desk while his protege, Sergeant John LaMoia, does the fieldwork. It doesn't sit well with Boldt, who, in spite of himself, craves the "dead bodies, if only because they kept his mind alive, his imagination active, and his raison d'etre intact." There are plenty of bodies to go around when a shipping container washes ashore full of Chinese immigrants, both dead and dying. An investigative reporter covering the case soon disappears, adding kidnapping to Boldt's plate and hurtling the lieutenant out of his chair and back into action, protocol notwithstanding. The trail is as multifaceted as ever, beginning with establishing time of death by studying the algae adhered to the shipping container, and ending with the discovery of a Chinese sweatshop in a confiscated freighter on Seattle's waterfront. Boldt's usual partner, forensic psychologist Daphne Matthews, plays a lesser role this time, but in her place Pearson substitutes television news anchor Stevie McNeal, who mounts her own investigation, thus introducing a meaty subplot involving media excesses. As always, Pearson builds suspense incrementally, brilliantly amassing details until his plot reaches critical mass at just the right moment. Several Boldt adventures ago, we rashly labeled Pearson "the best thriller writer alive"; time has done nothing to tarnish the accuracy of that claim. Bill Ott

Inside a shipping container that has washed ashore near Seattle during a storm is heard the "unmistakable cry of human voices." From this dramatic opening springs Pearson's sixth Lou Boldt thriller, in which the Seattle Police Department goes head to head with the INS to bust an immigrant-smuggling ring run by Chinese gangs. When TV news anchor Stevie McNeal's investigative reporting of the story leads to the disappearance of Melissa, her Chinese friend and cojournalist, Boldt, newly promoted to lieutenant and balking at the administrative duties that keep him from the field work he relishes, jumps into the investigation. Pearson puts the reader smack in the middle of a complex undercover police sting and delivers delectable characters such as Mama Lu, the fat Asian grocery maven, who resembles a "Chinese Winston Churchill." Inventive plotting and strong dialog build gripping suspense. This thriller is sure to be widely sought by library patrons.
-AMolly Gorman, San Marino, CA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786864400
• ISBN 13: 9780786864409
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 413