Cruel Intent

Cruel Intent by J. A. JanceAli Reynolds just wanted to get into her house and make Thanksgiving dinner. Little did she know that a serial killer would thrust his ugly way into her hopes for a pleasant holiday. This mystery really moved. Jance put the pedal to the metal and never let up. Ali is a likeable heroine who cares about people around her. She is tolerant of others and their differences. Her butler, Leland, provides her with a steady hand when she lets her emotions run away. Her relationship with her Mother and Dad came off as authentic and familiar. I found her a very believable character. Peter Winters, the psychopathic serial killer was almost stereotypically evil. He had no redeeming characteristics. Jance populated the book show more with characters that are entertaining and believable. The tension in the story and the action will provide every adrenal junkie a great rush. I liked the book enough to go out and get the two Ali Reynold’s novels that preceded it. I highly recommend the book. show less

A serial killer who focuses on cheating wives almost finishes Ali Reynolds, in this entry in Jance's other Arizona series. Unlike most books featuring a serial killer, this one does not linger lovingly over every gory detail. Instead, it is more about Ali's life, family, friends, and construction woes.

Worth reading but nothing special.

Cruel Intent is the fourth book in J.A. Jance's Ali Reynolds series. I've read two of her others and can say this is my favorite so far. It's a light, easy read without any glaring holes in the mystery and Jance has done a wonderful job of creating a character in Ali Reynolds who has day to day problems she seems to handle in imperfect ways. I like that. It gives a sense of reality to a mystery series where the crimes find the main character rather than the other way around.

Cruel Intent is about a man who uses his computer skills to find and hurt women. That's clear in the first couple of pages, so it's not a spoiler. But there are other characters in the book who balance the pure evil in this man: another computer expert who operates a show more legitimate business and cares about his clients, a construction contractor who loves his children and is willing to sacrifice his own happiness for theirs, a weak bureaucrat in a loveless marriage who would rather sneak around to find some happiness than face up to his situation. And Ali's family is an important part of this story. Her son, Chris, and his fiance are planning a wedding and experiencing typical problems with that process. That part was fun. Her mother is also a major player in this story. The one issue I had with this story concerns Ali's relationship with her mother and a choice Ali makes late in the book. I won't say anything more than that.

Cruel Intent is a good choice for people who like light, but sometimes violent, mysteries with characters we readers feel we know.

Steve Lindahl – author of Motherless Soul and White Horse Regressions show less

An up and coming young lawyer from Glasgow and a former TV personality retired to a mobile home in the Arizona backwoods would appear to have nothing in common and yet, as is the way with thrillers, they are both forced to fight for their lives when targeted by ruthless evil…

Now don’t get me wrong, I love thrillers – I love mysteries and detective stories and police procedurals, I even enjoy horror stories – but there comes a point where even the most dutiful brain rebels against the willing suspension of disbelief.

Ever noticed how few murders in thrillers are opportunistic? South African serial killers seldom have a personal motive for their crimes – they simply kill whenever they think they can get away with it. Your show more foreign psycho however is a far more complex character and needs a motive to justify his slaughters.

Daisy Chain, GJ Moffat’s debut novel, is an entirely different proposition: it has an urban rather than a rural setting and the ‘baddies’ – while they may be conscienceless killers – are simply, like good Nazis, following orders.

Yuppie Glasgow lawyer Logan Finch is get-head ambitious and appears to have it all – except he has only ever been half a person since Penelope Grant, the love of his life, simply walked out on him and then disappeared over 12 years ago.

As is so often the case when a naive innocent is threatened by evil, finch is saved by the expertise of a friend with a shadowy past and access to weapons. American Alex Cahill runs a security company and is present when police arrive from a murder scene in which Logan’s card was found under the corpse. The dead woman is Penny Morgan, Finch’s former girlfriend.

The police suspect him, but not only was he unaware that Penny had been in Glasgow for several months, he was also ignorant of the fact she had a daughter, Ellie – his daughter, who has been kidnapped by her mother’s murderers.

The child was taken to pressurize Finch into laundering money on behalf of an international racketeer: with the assistance of Cahill and his associates, Ellie is rescued, her abductors killed, and father and daughter are united for the first time.

Instead of finding another lawyer, the criminals set their sights on Logan, investigated his past, tracked down his girlfriend, and discovered he has a daughter – in short, they knew more about him than he knew about himself.

Is this usual gangster SOP? It seems like a lot of time, expense and trouble to go to merely to acquire leverage over a lawyer. But that’s what they do and why Logan finds himself risking all to save a girl he has never met.

As I said initially, homegrown killers have a lot to learn from their more sophisticated European and American brothers who seldom opt for the safe and easy when to comes to killing and, although their success rate is relatively low, have turned murder into an art form cherished by all thriller readers. show less

I have really enjoyed this series. Each book is just as good as the last so far. Something I noticed about this one that a lot of suspenseful mysteries don't fulfill is giving the point of view of the bad guy. I didn't have to try to figure out who is was or how it happened. That was all supplied. The suspense was waiting for them to be found out.

Of late I've been really souring on the insane overabundance of serial killer novels. They have been so overdone of late that it was hard to trudge through yet another one. Still, Cruel Intent was a pretty easy read and had a lighter tone than some of the others I've read lately. In Cruel Intent, ex TV journalist Ali Reynolds gets involved in a murder case when the contractor working on her case is investigated and later arrested for murder. In the process, she comes across a website devoted to married people hooking up and gets in the crosshairs of the killer. My biggest problem is that their was so much extraneous information that was neither pertinent to the story or remotely interesting. I think Jance could have cut a quarter of the show more novel out and not missed a beat. The whole side story where Ali was in charge of giving a scholarship was pointless. With a better editor this novel would have improved greatly.
Carl Alves - author of Two For Eternity show less

This was a pretty interesting book and the fourth in a series. It follows Ali Reynolds, a former LA newscaster, who now lives in her hometown of Sedona, Arizona. While fixing up her new home, her hired contractor is under suspicion in relation to his wife's gruesome murder. In typical "Ali" fashion, she becomes curious and tries to solve it with the help of a friend and gets more than she bargained for.

The story was interesting and did have some pretty thrilling parts, but I did rate it 3 out of 5 stars for a reason. Ali Reynolds is a character I love, no doubt, but she is also constantly getting involved in things that are better left to the police. I'll admit, she does have a knack for crime fighting, but I find it hard to believe show more that she just happens to come across the answers every single time.

That being said, I still enjoyed this book and would recommend it. show less