Another mind-boggling adventure filled with action, humor, and romance as the clever couple hone their budding skills and...
At least one of two married college professors finds that spying can be addictive.
Finn Larsson never knew that his wife, Hollis, had once attended the CIA academy until they were caught up in a hair-raising adventure in Ireland while doing what was supposed to be a simple favor for the CIA (Beyond the Pale, 2018). Now they’re dragged from the Michigan college where they teach into another dangerous case of espionage. Someone drops off an envelope with two passports with their pictures but the names of Tim and Janet McCabe along with a mysterious note in Spanish signed Tomas Silva. It sounds like the work of Declan Murphy, the charming art thief and forger they met in Ireland. Finn doesn’t want to get involved again, but Hollis is intrigued. Awakened in the middle of the night, they find South African agent Peter Moodley making tea in their kitchen and a dead man in the living room. Before they can learn more, they’re kidnapped and flown to Buenos Aires, where they’re deposited in a luxury hotel and given luggage filled with expensive clothing. In a rare moment of caution, they exchange the suite they were assigned for another room and await future developments. They have no clue what they’re supposed to do or whether the real McCabes are still alive, but they’re both adept at coming up with stories to fit the situation. Luckily, Peter and Declan are both in town and each willing in his own way to help the duo find an address book and deliver it to Silva’s boss, whom they have yet to meet, for a member of the mysterious TCT organization. Cunning and luck sustain them as they attempt to help the CIA trace TCT members while appeasing the people who apparently hired them as contract killers.
Another mind-boggling adventure filled with action, humor, and romance as the clever couple hone their budding skills and become a more valued asset to the CIA. Stay tuned.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5654-7
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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