Publishers Weekly
In Stone's convoluted third Julian Palmer thriller (after 2001's The Heat of Lies), the impenetrable nature of the crime and the elliptical writing style perfectly complement one another. Tom Hartley, an appealing if not riveting, unassuming guy of 40, lives with his mother and commutes from the suburbs into New York to keep his printing business alive. One day on the train, he becomes intrigued with a beautiful stranger, Laura Hodges-and her papers. He realizes he can make some money by using the information she has unwittingly shared with him. Indeed, Tom makes a big profit. His source, however, is not as fortunate: Laura dies "after a brief illness," reads her obituary. Suspicious, Tom searches Laura's house and finds a mysterious silver cylinder. When his house is trashed and his mother terrorized, he realizes the cylinder, now out of his hands, is valuable. Enter the engaging Julian Palmer, a police detective on maternity leave, tough and unsentimental (it's a little disappointing when later she gets sappy about an affair, endlessly ruminating on its future). Julian doesn't simply visit a case, she lives it, and it's this dedication that makes her good at her job. The plot becomes increasingly complex and at times difficult to follow, but the delicious twists are satisfying in the end. (Oct. 13) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Detective Julian Palmer, who just can't catch a normal case with normal suspects, signs on to investigate an insurance claim with sci-fi implications. When Tom Hartley notices a woman sitting opposite him on a commuter train, he isn't so smitten by her beauty that he doesn't notice her laptop as well, and decoding its news allows him to make a stock-market killing by putting $12,000 into Cartmann Systems. As Tom is rejoicing at his good fortune, though, he learns that Laura Hodges, his unwitting informant, is dead. Drawn irresistibly to the obsequies at her home, he finds something she was carrying that day on the train-something that will plunge him and his wheelchair-bound mother into danger, bring equally beautiful Julian onto the case and into his life in ways neither of them fully understands, and ignite a bidding war based on an amazing technology. Nor is the bidding war over Cartmann Systems, whose eccentric inventor chief died six months earlier; it's over Laura's own firm, Peale Investments, whose canny founder has the novel idea of pumping up his asking price by floating rumors of the space-age technology he's planning to sell for big, big bucks before his own inflated IPO can be consummated. Though he does go on at times, Stone shows himself as adept in the shady side of Wall Street as he's been in the byways of upstate New York (The Heat of Lies, 2001, etc.).
