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Summary
Summary
Becca Matlock, a speechwriter for the governor of New York, is targeted by a stalker, who shoots the governor to prove his point. Seeking refuge on the coast of Maine, Becca finds herself at greater risk. Is an unexpected stranger to town the stalker or a friend?
Author Notes
Catherine Coulter was born on December 26, 1942 in Cameron County, Texas. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas and a master's degree in early 19th century European history from Boston College. Her first novel, The Autumn Countess, was published in 1978. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1982, she worked on Wall Street as a speech writer. Since then she has written over 65 books including The Aristocrat, Afterglow, False Pretenses, Impulse, and Born to Be Wild. She also writes the FBI Thriller series and numerous historical romance trilogies including the Song, Star, Magic, Night, Bride, Viking, and Legacy Trilogies. She writes A Brit in the FBI series with J. T. Ellison.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Trouble, in the form of psychopathic madmen, seems to follow political speechwriter Becca Matlock around like a personal storm cloud in bestselling historical romance (False Pretenses) and thriller (The Edge) author Coulter's newest suspense novel. When a stalker who calls himself Becca's "boyfriend" accuses her of sleeping with the governor and threatens to kill his perceived rival if she doesn't stop, Becca turns to New York's finest, but the cops repeatedly dismiss her. Worse, when the governor is shot, they assume she's responsible. With nowhere to turn, Becca retreats to coastal Riptide, Maine, a sleepy community that is also home to her college friend Tyler. But all is not peaceful there either. Tyler's wife apparently disappeared a while back, the locals think he killed her, and a skeleton falls out of the basement wall of Becca's rented house. Things get really out of hand when it looks as though Becca's problems can be traced to an axe-grinding former KGB agent. Although the book's setting shifts from New York City streets to rural New England, there is little atmospheric detail. The unsettling tone moves from NYPD Blue to Murder, She Wrote with creepy Cold War inflections. But convolution doesn't camouflage the fact that the heroine has more guts than brains, and the villains are ultimately silly rather than menacing. When Dillon and Sherlock Savich, FBI computer specialists from Coulter's The Maze, enter the plot, one gets the feeling that the gang's all here, but the hijinks remain untethered. Only diehard Coulter fans will want to tread water with this one. Doubleday Book Club main selection; 20-city author tour. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
When Becca Matlock, a political speechwriter for the governor of New York, first begins receiving threatening phone calls, she is as perplexed as she is frightened. The caller tells her to stop sleeping with the governor even though she isn't. The police don't believe her, even after the stalker kills a homeless woman. When the governor is shot, Becca flees to Riptide, a small town in Maine. There she reunites with an old college friend, Tyler, but her old troubles (and new ones, too) are close at hand. A skeleton is found in her closet, bringing the unwanted attention of the local authorities. A mysterious, handsome man named Adam shows up to protect her from the stalker, who has followed her to Riptide. As Becca and Adam try to puzzle out the stalker's motives, issues from Becca's past, most importantly the father she has long believed dead, come to the foreground. When Becca and Adam realize who their enemy is, the novel plunges ahead at a breathtaking pace. Coulter's fans will also be pleased to see the return of some of the characters from her previous suspense novels. Riptide will be in high demand, and deservedly so. --Kristine Huntley
School Library Journal Review
Trouble, in the form of psychopathic madmen, seems to follow political speechwriter Becca Matlock around like a personal storm cloud in bestselling historical romance (False Pretenses) and thriller (The Edge) author Coulter's newest suspense novel. When a stalker who calls himself Becca's "boyfriend" accuses her of sleeping with the governor and threatens to kill his perceived rival if she doesn't stop, Becca turns to New York's finest, but the cops repeatedly dismiss her. Worse, when the governor is shot, they assume she's responsible. With nowhere to turn, Becca retreats to coastal Riptide, Maine, a sleepy community that is also home to her college friend Tyler. But all is not peaceful there either. Tyler's wife apparently disappeared a while back, the locals think he killed her, and a skeleton falls out of the basement wall of Becca's rented house. Things get really out of hand when it looks as though Becca's problems can be traced to an axe-grinding former KGB agent. Although the book's setting shifts from New York City streets to rural New England, there is little atmospheric detail. The unsettling tone moves from NYPD Blue to Murder, She Wrote with creepy Cold War inflections. But convolution doesn't camouflage the fact that the heroine has more guts than brains, and the villains are ultimately silly rather than menacing. When Dillon and Sherlock Savich, FBI computer specialists from Coulter's The Maze, enter the plot, one gets the feeling that the gang's all here, but the hijinks remain untethered. Only diehard Coulter fans will want to tread water with this one. Doubleday Book Club main selection; 20-city author tour. (July) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Regency novelist Coulter moved to suspense a few years back and now offers her fifth thriller (after The Edge, 1999, etc.). And what is a thriller these days without a serial killer? Becca Matlock, a speechwriter for the governor of New York, keeps getting threatening phone calls that accuse her of sleeping with the governor. She goes to the police in Albany, who think she's a liar, then to the police in New York City, who insult her when their investigation turns up no leads. Meanwhile, Becca's mother is dying, and Becca doesn't want leave her. But when the caller blows up a bag lady under her Manhattan apartment's balcony, then follows up (we assume) by shooting the governor through the neck just after he's addressed a medical convention, Becca flees the city and hides out in Riptide, Maine, where she rents an old Victorian house. Gosh, and who is there to greet her but her old geek friend from college, Tyler McBride, who has refashioned himself into a buff stud. Will the phone caller follow? Will night follow day? Well paced but undistinguished. (Doubleday Book Club main selection) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
When Becca answers the phone, she knows that it is the stranger calling himself her boyfriend, and she knows that his threats are real. He proves it by casually blowing up the bag lady in the park across the street. The police do not believe her explanation, however, believing that she was involved in that death and those that followed. She flees to Riptide, a small town on the coast of Maine. After having been completely alone, Becca is suddenly surrounded by friends, including Lacy Sherlock Savich and Dillon Savich, last seen in Coulter!s The Edge. Who sent them, and, most importantly, who is the stalker? The suspense builds and with it a romance between Becca and Adam, her main protector. Coulter has penned another fun read. The characters are well drawn and act plausibly. With fewer outrageous outside elements thrown in, this book is somewhat more believable than The Edge. For popular fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 3/1/00.]"Andrea Lee Shuey, Shuey Consulting, Dallas (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
New York City June 15 Present Becca was watching an afternoon soap opera she'd seen off and on since she was a kid. She found herself wondering if she would ever have a child who needed a heart transplant one month and a new kidney the next, or a husband who wouldn't be faithful to her for longer than it took a new woman to look in his direction. Then the phone rang. She jumped to her feet, then stopped dead still and stared over at the phone. She heard a guy on TV whining about how life wasn't fair. He didn't know what fair was. She made no move to answer the phone. She just stood there and listened, watching it as it rang three more times. Then, finally, because her mother was lying in a coma in Lenox Hill Hospital, because she just plain couldn't stand the ringing ringing ringing, she watched her hand reach out and pick up the receiver. She forced her mouth to form the single word. "Hello?" "Hi, Rebecca. It's your boyfriend. I've got you so scared you have to force yourself to pick up the phone. Isn't that right?" She closed her eyes as that hated voice, low and deep, swept over her, into her, making her so afraid she was shaking. No hint of an Atlanta drawl, no sharp New York vowels, no dropped R's from Boston. A voice that was well educated, with smooth, clear diction, perhaps even a touch of the Brit in it. Old? Young? She didn't know, couldn't tell. She had to keep it together. She had to listen carefully, to remember how he spoke, what he said. You can do it. Keep it together. Make him talk, make him say something, you never know what will pop out. That was what the police psychologist in Albany had told her to do when the man had first started calling her. Listen carefully. Don't let him scare you. Take control. You guide him, not the other way around. Becca licked her lips, chapped from the hot, dry air in Manhattan that week, an anomaly, the weather forecaster had said. And so Becca repeated her litany of questions, trying to keep her voice calm, cool, in charge, yes, that was her. "Won't you tell me who you are? I really want to know. Maybe we can talk about why you keep calling me. Can we do that?" "Can't you come up with some new questions, Rebecca? After all, I've called you a good dozen times now. And you always say the same things. Ah, they're from a shrink, aren't they? They told you to ask those questions, to try to distract me, to get me to spill my guts to you. Sorry, it won't work." She'd never really thought it would work, that stratagem. No, this guy knew what he was doing, and he knew how to do it. She wanted to plead with him to leave her alone, but she didn't. Instead, she snapped. She simply lost it, the long-buried anger cutting through her bonegrinding fear. She gripped the phone, knuckles white, and yelled, "Listen to me, you little prick. Stop saying you're my boyfriend. You're nothing but a sick jerk. Now, how about this for a question? Why don't you go to hell where you belong? Why don't you go kill yourself, you're sure not worth anything to the human race. Don't call me anymore, you pathetic bastard. The cops are on to you. The phone is tapped, do you hear me? They're going to get you and fry you." She'd caught him off guard, she knew it, and an adrenaline rush sent her sky-high, but only for a moment. After a slight pause, he recovered. In a calm, reasonable voice, he said, "Now, Rebecca sweetheart, you know as well as I do that the cops now don't believe you're being stalked, that some weird guy is calling you at all hours, trying to scare you. You had the phone tap put in yourself because you couldn't get them to do it. And I'll never talk long enough for that old, low-tech equipment of yours to get a trace. Oh yes, Rebecca, because you insulted me, you'll have to pay for it, big-time." She slammed down the receiver. She held it there, hard, as if trying to stanch the bleeding of a wound, as if holding it down would keep him from dialing her again, keep him away from her. Slowly, finally, she backed away from the phone. She heard a wife on the TV soap plead with her husband not to leave her for her younger sister. She walked out onto her small balcony and looked over Central Park, then turned a bit to the right to look at the Metropolitan Museum. Hordes of people, most in shorts, most of them tourists, sat on the steps, reading, laughing, talking, eating hot dogs from the vendor Teodolpho, some of them probably smoking dope, picking pockets, and there were two cops on horseback nearby, their horses' heads pumping up and down, nervous for some reason. The sun blazed down. It was only mid-June, yet the unseasonable heat wave continued unabated. Inside the apartment it was twenty-five degrees cooler. Too cold, at least for her, but she couldn't get the thermostat to move either up or down. The phone rang again. She heard it clearly through the half-closed glass door. She jerked around and nearly fell over the railing. Not that it was unexpected. No, never that, it was just so incongruous set against the normalcy of the scene outside. She forced herself to look back into her mother's lovely pastel living room, to the glass table beside the sofa, at the white phone that sat atop that table, ringing, ringing. She let it ring six more times. Then she knew she had to answer it. It might be about her mother, her very sick mother, who might be dying. But of course she knew it was him. It didn't matter. Did he know why she even had the phone turned on in the first place? He seemed to know everything else, but he hadn't said anything about her mother. She knew she had no choice at all. She picked it up on the tenth ring. "Rebecca, I want you to go out onto your balcony again. Look to where those cops are sitting on their horses. Do it now, Rebecca." She laid down the receiver and walked back out onto the balcony, leaving the glass door open behind her. She looked down at the cops. She kept looking. She knew something horrible was going to happen, she just knew it, and there was nothing she could do about it but watch and wait. She waited for three minutes. Just when she was beginning to convince herself that the man was trying new and different ways to terrorize her, there was a loud explosion. She watched both horses rear up wildly. One of the cops went flying. He landed in a bush as thick smoke billowed up, obscuring the scene. When the smoke cleared a bit, she saw an old bag lady lying on the sidewalk, her market cart in twisted pieces beside her, her few belongings strewn around her. Pieces of paper fluttered down to the sidewalk, now rutted with deep pockmarks. A large bottle of ginger ale was broken, liquid flowing over the old woman's sneakers. Time seemed to have stopped, then suddenly there was chaos as everyone in view exploded into action. Some people who'd been loitering on the steps of the museum ran toward the old lady. The cops got there first; the one who'd been thrown from his horse was limping as he ran. They were yelling, waving their arms--at the carnage or the onrushing people, Becca didn't know. She saw the horses throwing their heads from side to side, their eyes rolling at the smoke, the smell of the explosive. Becca stood there frozen, watching. The old woman didn't move. Becca knew she was dead. Her stalker had detonated a bomb and killed that poor old woman. Why? Just to terrorize her more? She was already so terrified she could hardly function. What did he want now? She'd left Albany, left the governor's staff with no warning, had not even called to check in. She walked slowly back inside the living room, firmly closing the glass door behind her. She looked at the phone, heard him saying her name, over and over. Rebecca, Rebecca. Very slowly, she hung up. She fell to her knees and jerked the connector out of the wall jack. The phone in the bedroom rang, and kept ringing. She pressed herself close to the wall, her palms slammed against her ears. She had to do something. She had to talk to the cops. Again. Surely now that someone was dead, they would believe that some maniac was terrorizing her, stalking her, murdering someone to show her he meant business. This time they had to believe her. Excerpted from Riptide by Catherine Coulter All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.