Aphrodite

The New York Times

… a smart, cynical thriller … Although the noble Justin begins life as a stock character, he's got a good mind -- keen enough to work out this Chinese puzzle of a plot and twisted enough to accept the macabre conspiracy theory on which it's built. — Marilyn Stasio

Publishers Weekly

Robert Ludlum meets Dashiell Hammett in this gripping, wildly plotted thriller by the author of Gideon and Icarus. In the sleepy town of East End, New York, former homicide cop Justin Westwood is trying to escape the tragedy of his past by consuming scotch and writing traffic tickets for the local police department. The murder of a young reporter (disguised as an accident), however, catapults him out of his stasis and into a complicated investigation. A terrified witness tells of a blond killer, whom readers first met in the book's opening pages murdering another young woman. As Justin investigates, it seems that the police and the FBI are always one step ahead of him, and that folks with any connection to the case start turning up dead. Signs point to a sinister fountain-of-youth project run by a mysterious, all-powerful cabal, which the reporter had accidentally uncovered. If Westwood penetrates the secrets of the Aphrodite program, he's sure to be their next victim. A smalltown cop does battle with a great conspiracy: the plot may sound conventional, even hackneyed, but Andrews sustains white-hot tension throughout, bolstered by enough surprises and body blows to satisfy even a hardened mystery/conspiracy buff. The suspense flags slightly at midpoint, but elsewhere the pace is fast, the dialogue sharp, the characters skillfully drawn and the familiar, heady whodunit action cleverly handled. Agent, Esther Newberg. (Jan. 2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Justin Westwood is a police officer hiding out from a painful past in a small, virtually crime-free town on Long Island, NY. When a murder occurs, Justin tries and fails to stay uninvolved; circumstances drive him to investigate the case, which gets more and more complicated. A string of murders and suspicious deaths all seem to tie together, but the motive is unclear. Justin keeps probing, even after the FBI gets drawn in. When he is charged with murder, he knows something big is going on: the code name Aphrodite keeps coming up. Well read by Buck Schirner, this thriller is packed with violence, death, and adventure. The twists and turns keep the listener guessing. Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A smart cop, a mad scientist, and a fountain-of-youth project that springs a leak. It's all so low-key at the start. All right, not really, given that there's a mysterious death, and that the venue is a tiny Long Island town where law enforcement is seldom called upon to do more than hand out traffic tickets. It takes Justin Westwood to make the dread connections. Once a big-city homicide detective on the fast track, he was derailed by a horrific family tragedy and subsequently took himself out of his job and the rest of society. But instincts are instincts, and Justin, once the model of a supercop, can't help but see what his overwhelmed colleagues on the East End Harbor PD are blind to: that the death of local reporter Susanna Morgan was anything but accidental, and that a dark and dangerous conspiracy is inextricably attached. Multibillionaire/world-class scientist/certifiable crackpot Douglas Kranston has long been seeking some means of halting the aging process. Now suddenly Justin, along with a child and her mother, looms as an obstacle. Kranston's beloved project requires that for all three the aging process must be curtailed with extreme prejudice. Once again, Andrews (Icarus, 2001, etc.) demonstrates his knack for making a sympathetic hero likable enough to redeem-well, almost redeem-an impossibly convoluted plot.