Point of Impact

When a sniper begins picking off seemingly unconnected London residents, Scotland Yard detective Robin Culley searches for a link between the victims, a search that takes him to the highest level of British politics

As in Glory and Crow's Parliament , Britisher Curtis has crafted another thriller of an uncommonly high order . This compelling, literate work is distinguished by narrative precision and unexpected bursts of (generally sardonic) humor. A model of intricate plotting, Point of Impact is often about the unexpected--in events, in behavior. After an ominous prologue in Dartmoor, a sniper begins picking off random victims in London. Pursuing the killer, Scotland Yard maverick Robin Culley encounters menace at every turn from such sinister figures as an Arizona art collector who possesses people as if they were so many paintings. Another key figure is Culley's ex-wife, struggling with her conflicting feelings about a reconciliation: "It's like being in a house where you used to live, but you can't quite remember its danger points." Throughout, events are made more chilling by the author's characteristic air of detachment--"There are a lot of dead people. It looks like a madman. So it probably is." Moods and locales change with lightning precision, with rarely a missed beat, and seemingly disparate plot elements are ingeniously tied together. There is something approaching poetry amidst all this intrigue and duplicity, and telling, deceptively brief descriptions (heard via telephone, a fussy art dealer's "voice had presented pursed lips"). A smashing yarn, made more so by its humanity.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Big and brawny British police procedural--London cop vs. serial killer and cohorts--by the talented author of Glory and Crow's Parliament. Curtis presses a new wrinkle into the serial-killer formula by having his madman killing for pay, with one of the victims--an art dealer--a deliberate target screened by many randomly chosen others. After much spadework, Robin Culley of Scotland Yard becomes aware of the murderous conspiracy, but he still must catch sniper Eric Ross and figure out who hired him and why--even as Ross, as Culley soon realizes and as we learn from creepy forays into Ross's head, has become addicted to the godlike powers of death-dealing. Complicating both the plot and Culley's life--already tangled by his knotty relationship with his estranged wife--is the hiring, by the same mystery man who hired Ross, of sharpshooter Martin Jackson: once Ross's best pal but now aiming to shoot out-of- control Ross and then nosy Culley. As Jackson stalks Ross and Ross stalks innocents, Culley flies to Arizona to look into a rich art collector who's transformed his desert acres into a fantastic rose garden, and who may be the brains behind the killings. But he's only a guilty accomplice, as Culley learns by ruthlessly seducing the man's neurotic daughter and using her as blackmail-bait, leading to her suicide. Back in England, as the panicking masterminds behind the killings--key to an art-theft scam--bump each other off, Culley at last snares Ross, only to have Jackson kill Ross, then dangle Culley's wife from a high window and drop her--an indiscretion that Culley avenges in a mano-…-mano showdown on a fog-swept moor. Kind of a sophisticated cops-and-robbers variant of the spaghetti western: tough yet sentimental, unwieldy yet grand, suspenseful yet utterly predictable as its textured yet super-macho hero and villains vector toward their inexorable fates. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.