The Crush
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- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
After she unwittingly frees a dangerous contract killer, a surgeon reluctantly joins forces with a tenacious detective obsessed with taking down their enemy at all costs.
As a surgeon, Dr. Rennie Newton is the consummate professional. When she's summoned to jury duty, she brings competence and composure to the courtroom -- a skill she learned while performing surgeries. It is this commitment to precision that compels her to deliver a not guilty verdict in the murder case against notorious contract killer Ricky Lozada.
It will be the most regrettable decision of her life. When a rival colleague is brutally slain, Lozada's menacing shadow looms over the murder, but the investigators pinpoint Rennie as the prime suspect. Soon, the police begin violating the privacy she has cultivated and protected at all costs. And when Lozada begins an earnest courtship, it becomes terrifyingly clear that he is obsessed with having her.
Wick Threadgill is a detective on indefinite leave from the Fort Worth PD with a very personal agenda for the contract killer. Temperamental, bitter, and driven by loyalty and love, Wick is determined to destroy Lozada. In order to defeat him -- and save their own lives -- Rennie and Wick form an uneasy alliance.
Mistrustful of each other, they know only one thing with absolute certainty: like one of Lozada's prize scorpions, they won't see it coming when this killer strikes. The Crush will take you on a tortuous path through a twisted sociopath's eerie obsession, a haunted man's fragile hopes for redemption, and a woman's heart as she struggles to face her greatest fear: to open herself to love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brown's latest thriller pits the infamous Ricky Lozada, an unscrupulous killer for hire, against Wick Threadgill, a wily, disgruntled detective on leave from the force. Threadgill's former partner, Oren Wesley, lures him back with the news that Lozada against whom Threadgill has a personal vendetta has murdered a respected doctor. The author ups the stakes by giving Threadgill and the killer the same love interest: Dr. Rennie Newton, a no-nonsense surgeon who unwittingly attracts Lozada's obsessive attention while serving on a jury that acquits him for murder. Newton's secret past raises doubts about where exactly her loyalties lie, and Brown deftly builds suspense around the romantic aspect of her story. She also scores points for her insight into the sociopath's mind, despite a rather facile explanation of how he went bad. (Not everyone with a handicapped younger sibling who gets all the parents' attention ends up a ruthless killer.) Similarly, the underlying reason for Dr. Newton's startling transformation from a young adult who lived on the wild side to a cold, controlled professional is too pat. Worst of all, Brown's prose seems aimed at an audience of eighth-graders, padded throughout with a slew of adjectives, useless descriptions and catch phrases ("Is that your final answer?"). But once things get rolling, the plot crackles with tension moving toward the final showdown between Lozada and Wick. Brown fans will not be disappointed.
