9781501153020 |
9781501153013 |
9781473690288 |
Also published: New York : Atria Books, [2017] |
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Library | Shelf Location | Shelf Number | Item Barcode | Genre/Subject | Material Type | Status |
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Searching... Semaphore Library - City of PAE Libraries | Adult Fiction | CLE P | C0512412632 | Mystery | Book | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the Edgar-nominated author of Trust No One and Joe Victim "who uses words like lethal weapons" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times ), a thriller about a blind teenager who receives a corneal donation and begins to see and feel memories from their previous owner--a homicide detective who was also his father.
Joshua is convinced there is a curse on his family.
It's taken loved ones from him, it's robbed him of his eyesight, and it's the reason why his father was killed while investigating the homicide of a young woman.
Joshua is handed an opportunity he can't refuse: an operation that will allow him to see the world through his father's eyes. As Joshua navigates a realm of sight, he gets glimpses of what these eyes might have witnessed in their previous life. What, exactly, was his dad up to in his role as a police officer? And what, exactly, were the circumstances surrounding his death?
There are consequences to the life his father was living, including the wrath of a man hell-bent on killing, a man who is drawing closer and closer to Joshua. Soon, Joshua discovers a world even darker than the one he has emerged from--a world in which the gift of sight comes with dire, dangerous consequences that threaten everything that Joshua holds dear.
A riveting thriller filled with hidden secrets and unspeakable horrors that will keep you guessing until the very last page, A Killer Harvest is a "powerful, thought-provoking novel" ( Publishers Weekly , starred review).
Author Notes
Paul Cleave is the internationally bestselling author of ten award-winning crime thrillers, including Joe Victim , which was a finalist for the 2014 Edgar and Barry Awards, Trust No One and Five Minutes Alone , which won consecutive Ngaio Marsh Awards in 2015 and 2016. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-finalist Cleave (Trust No One) makes an implausible, but very creepy, premise work in this powerful, thought-provoking novel set in Christchurch, New Zealand, which could pass for any of the corrupt cities more familiar to fans of American noir. Det. Insp. Ben Kirk and Det. Insp. Mitchell Logan are on the trail of the sadist who butchered a young woman with a power saw left near her abandoned car on a motorway. They trace the blood-stained tool to a construction site, where foreman Simon Bower identifies it as belonging to one of his workers, Boris McKenzie. Kirk and Logan's efforts to apprehend McKenzie end badly, claiming the lives of two men, one of whom is an organ donor whose death provides the chance for a new life for a blind 16-year-old boy. When the eye operation doesn't go as planned, the plot spins off in a new direction and more violence follows. Few characters are wholly innocent, and the road to hell acquires a few more paving stones by the end of this impressive crime thriller. Agent: Jane Gregory, Gregory and Company. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Nightmare specialist Cleave (Trust No One, 2015, etc.) puts a new spin on the old horror chestnut that transplants a dead killer's organs into an innocent victim. Make that several new spins.Life hasn't been kind to Joshua Logan. Blind from birth, he's never seen so much as a shape or color. He's never met his father, who died before he was born, or his mother, who died soon thereafter. And now his foster father, DI Mitchell Logan, has died as well, dropped from a high floor on a construction site by Simon Bower, the sex killer he was after, moments before Bower was shot himself by Logan's partner, DI Ben Kirk. The only silver lining in all this pain is that Logan arranged for pioneering ophthalmologist Toni Coleman to transplant his eyes to Joshua, who can suddenly see the world in all its glory. At least out of his left eye, anyway; his right eye presents a consistently darker and more unfocused view. Neither Joshua nor anyone else knows that's because a careless orderly confused the dead police officer's donor eyes with those of his killer, and now Joshua has ended up with one eye from each donor. For quite a while, the cellular memory he's inherited from both his foster father and a seriously disturbed murderer seems the least of his problems, for he's bullied at his new school and stalked by fired deliveryman Vincent Archer, Bower's partner in crime, who's determined to avenge his best friend by making Ben Kirk's life hell, killing everyone close to hima list on which Joshua figures prominently. But a further series of plot twists shows that the greatest danger comes from somewhere else and brings Joshua's nerve-wracking double dose of cellular memory back to center stage. Starting with a macabre setup, Cleave keeps upping the stakes till any scrap of plausibility is left far behind and only an increasingly effective series of hair-raising thrills remains. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Two homicide detectives, in collusion with a doctor, transcend legal and moral boundaries for what they consider a righteous cause: killing bad people to provide organs for good people. But they don't factor in cellular memory, the notion that memory can reside in organs other than the brain, accounting for odd behavioral changes in transplant recipients. When Christchurch, New Zealand, cops Mitchell Logan and Ben Kirk apprehend murderer Simon Bower on a construction site, Bower shoots Logan with a nail gun and pushes him to his death; in response, Kirk kills Bower. Logan has stipulated that his eyes go to his blind 16-year-old son, Joshua. But when both Logan's and Bower's organs are harvested, a doped-up resident drops the eyes he's delivering to the two operating rooms. Joshua joins the world of the sighted, but he's plagued with disturbing dreams, launching a deadly quest for revenge before uncovering what the father he loved and admired has done. Cleave, a master of dark and compelling thrillers, puts a moral spin on this twisting, chilling tale with its disturbing finale.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LOUISE PENNY wrote the book on escapist mysteries - a dozen of them, in fact, almost all set in the sheltered Canadian village of Three Pines. "It was a haven, a buffer, from the cares and cruelty of the world," she tells us in GLASS HOUSES (Minotaur, $28.99), a place seemingly so free of malice and discord that Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Surete du Québec, and his wife, Reine-Marie, have made it their sanctuary. One of the pleasures of returning to this series is visiting old friends in the village like Gabri and Olivier, who run the convivial B&B; the artist Clara Morrow, whose startling portraits will haunt you; and (a personal favorite) Ruth ¿ardo, a poet who accurately describes herself as "a crazy old woman who prays for Satan and has a duck." The strangeness starts with the traditional Halloween party at the local bistro, attended by a masked, hooded figure in a black cloak who reappears the following day to take up sentry duty on the village green. Still as death and silent as the grave, the visitor resists efforts to engage him in conversation. After a while, people just leave him alone and go about their business - all except a Spanish-speaking guest at the B&B who identifies this specter as a cobrador del frac, a collector of unpaid debts (including moral debts) who follows defaulters, shaming them with his remorseless gaze. In the presence of this wraith, the villagers begin to exhume their own guilty secrets. A creepy twist in the narrative traces the cobrador back to medieval Spain, when plague victims, lepers and witches were consigned to a remote island to die. Those who survived and managed to return to the mainland silently stalked the people who had banished them and, over the years, became mythic figures. In his dark robes, the cobrador becomes a vivid metaphor for opioids like fentanyl, the "modern-day Black Death" that drug cartels are smuggling across the border through Three Pines and into Vermont. If Gamache can't contain this plague, our last hope may be Superman. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, a "celluloid necropolis" for folks like Alex Whitman, a snarky film fanatic who has been hired by another fanatic to find what may be the first motion picture ever made. Jonathan Skariton's debut novel, SÉANCE INFERNALE (Knopf, $26.95), named for that very item, is a dense but thrilling exploration of the mystery surrounding a film that was said to have predated both Edison and the brothers Lumiere, but disappeared, along with its inventor, on a train to Paris in 1890. The plot is packed with film ephemera, some of it mesmerizing, some of it as unnecessary as the secondary plot, set in Edinburgh (what would mystery writers do without Edinburgh?), about a present-day serial killer who stashes his victims in the underground vaults of the Old City. "Some of these art-house freak films make my skin crawl," says a police constable, referring to the killer's snuff video. But as long as Skariton keeps to movie history, we can concentrate on other mysteries - like whether Edison murdered his rival. A CHILD'S rage can be fierce. Consider Ruby, the almost feral heroine of Kate Hamer's domestic thriller, THE DOLL FUNERAL (Melville House, $25.99), who learns on her 13th birthday that she was adopted. Ruby is helpless to do anything about the beatings she receives from the man she thought was her father, but the dramas she stages for her dolls tell the story. "My play had changed: I now arranged for them to have little accidents about the house - a trip and a tumble down the stairs, or Sindy's head stuck in the oven while Paul stood outside and watched her through the window." So it's no surprise when Ruby puts a match to her tormentor's clothes and sets a greenhouse on fire. Hamer's melodic voice hovers between the cold realism of those vicious beatings and an otherworldly mysticism that empowers Ruby to see dead people like Shadow, a young soul who longs to be alive again. But it takes a kind doctor to identify Ruby's ghosts as her ancestors. "There's no specters, or apparitions," he tells her. "The real ghosts are just family." The family she's longed for her entire life. GUTS, GORE AND A LITTLE S&M - what else would you expect from Paul Cleave, a New Zealand author who uses words like lethal weapons. A KILLER HARVEST (Atria, $26) tosses another ingredient into the mix: the fear of losing your identity. In an experimental operation, Joshua Logan, 16 years old and blind since birth, receives the eyes of his father, a detective with the Christchurch Police Department who died during the ill-timed arrest of a chain-saw killer. The operation doesn't go exactly as planned, leaving Joshua's newfound vision a bit, well, warped. Cleave follows the boy as he explores his surroundings with a sense of anxiety and awe, but for the most part he writes rough stuff. Dogs are killed, young women are kidnapped and tied up, and one unfortunate soul is chopped into pieces, then stashed in the freezer for a rainy day. And there's an inspired cliffhanger ending that promises a lot more mayhem to come. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.