THE A LIST

A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the
gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali
Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa
Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care
happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was
none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than
that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook.
When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s
inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of
the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time
it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for
commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg
donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself
with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel
Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the
nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records
upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex
in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because
their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both
California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know
that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list
they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but
loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018),
turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts
and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the
boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently,
differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.