Dead Tide

Publishers Weekly

Television anchor Lacie Wagner submits to more gruesome thrills in this sensationalistic sequel to Burnout (1999). On the Nantucket beach where Lacie schedules her exercise runs from her vacation home, a "strange water warrior" Jane Doe washes up, contrary to the likely action of wind and current. The body is oddly marked with lacerations and burns, adorned with diamond earrings and also wearing military-grade diving equipment yet the local and national military establishments deny knowledge of her. Lacie uses this story for her comeback to national news after medical leave (due to action in Burnout) and in the course of her investigation collects a circle of new people: muscular Tom Wheeler, the Nantucket medical examiner; aggressive Assistant DA Hinks; cranky Boston medical examiner Miles McKenzie; and eventually, through McKenzie's contacts, the cartoonishly superlative investigator Nick St. James. The stereotypes and coincidences pile up until Lacie is sure she has been targeted for a weird scheme of torture; the mysterious manipulator behind the scenes feeds her hints about other missing women and sets her up to publicize his macabre trophies as hard news. Disturbing physiological effects, dubious technical gadget descriptions and the preponderance of beautiful, lush-chested women with powerful jobs stalked and tortured by ambiguous handsome men make this work a touch more lurid than Patricia Cornwell's or Linda Fairstein's. (July 2) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Just because Lacie Wagner, unwinding on Nantucket before she resumes her stint as a D.C. news anchor, has found the body shouldn't give her any special access to the investigation-at least, that's what the hard-nosed ADA for Cape Cod and the islands thinks. Like it or not, though, Lacie's in the thick of the case from the moment she notices the corpse's unexplained burns. Soon, she's talked her way into the post-mortem, gone on the air with the Boston NBC affiliate, and traced the drowned Jane Doe to a Special Ops unit so secret that neither Congress nor the President knows about it. She's also attracted the attention of charming, sociopathic businessman Justin Vale, who's cultivated her acquaintance just long enough to bed her and vanish in a puff of smoke. Throughout the first half of this fleet, unnerving thriller, Kadow, taking a leaf from Patricia Cornwell's forensics but pushing into far uglier territory outside the lab, keeps spinning out mysteries so brilliantly that it hardly matters that the killer's been revealed. Only when Lacie hooks up with retired investigator Nick St. James, who's as masculine and windy as Travis McGee at his worst, do things settle into a more predictable groove-all action, all the time, with a retrospective body count that shoots higher than Old Faithful, just in case you don't care enough about the prospective victims already threatened with a watery grave. As in Lacie's hardcover debut (Burnout, 1999), a potent first half fizzles in a shower of sparks. But nobody will stop reading halfway through.