A Garden of Vipers (Carson Ryder) - Hardcover

Kerley, Jack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525949526 ISBN 13: 9780525949527

Publisher: Dutton, 2006

Synopsis

Investigating a possible link between a missing informant and a serial killer, Mobile detectives Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus are simultaneously drawn into the dealings of a socialite philanthropist family with ties to Ryder's girlfriend. By the author of The Death Collectors. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

JACK KERLEY is a writer and avid fisherman. He is the author of critically acclaimed The Hundredth Man and The Death Collectors, both published by Dutton.

Reviews

Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus, homicide detectives on the Mobile, Ala., police force, hit the ground running in Kerley's appealing third suspense novel (after The Hundredth Man and The Death Collectors). In a race against other cops, the pair take up the case of a young journalist, Taneesha Franklin, who's been slashed to death. The victim was close to Carson's girlfriend, TV reporter Dani Danbury, who was mentoring her. Almost every trail leads in some fashion to the Kincannons—a family with great wealth, skeletons in the closet and a matriarch with tenuous control over her fractious, unstable sons. Ryder and Nautilus make an effective team—until one of them is taken out of action and each has to fight for survival on his own. Kerley has a nice feel for the Gulf area, and his detectives are a couple of aces sharing competence, bravery and camaraderie. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* A young female reporter is tortured then murdered. A blind woman is kidnapped and brutalized but survives, and a high-priced call girl is burned alive. All the cases are connected, but Mobile, Alabama, detectives Carson Ryder and Harry Nautilus aren't sure how. Serial killers are almost compelled by their pathology to commit the same crime again and again, but these murders are dissimilar in forensically significant ways. Meanwhile, as Ryder and Nautilus head-butt various dead ends, Ryder learns that his television reporter girlfriend is being wooed by Lucas Kincannon, the owner of the station and leading son of Mobile's most prestigious, albeit nouveau riche, families. Ryder's distaste for the Kincannon clan, put with a few follow-the-money clues, lands the detectives on a collision course with the city's most powerful forces. Kerley's third Mobile mystery is as compelling as his first two, The Hundredth Man (2004) and The Death Collectors (2005). His plotting is cleverly believable, his protagonists realistically flawed, and his villains utterly but all-too-humanly evil. The Kincannon tribe will have readers casting suspicious glances at whatever powerful families are leading their local charities. Excellent. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525949526
• ISBN 13: 9780525949527
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352