An exemplary continuation of Safflind’s mystery-thriller series.
In the second installment of Safflind’s (Shadowmaster I: More or Less than Human, 2012) mystery-thriller series, a 1992 counterespionage group must solve a murder and stop a conflict on the other side of the world.
Barry Sandler witnesses a plane crash and manages to pull a woman named Helena from the wreckage. He takes her to his home, which also serves as the headquarters of Investigative Services Inc., an agency led by former psychologist Adrian Kahler, who has the ability to probe people’s minds. When Barry and Adrian are hired to look into the murder of a congressman’s aide whose body has been drained of blood, they keep finding connections to Helena—who rather selectively answers their questions. The novel boasts elements of a spy novel and a mystery, as the murder investigation has ties to the ongoing Yugoslavian civil war; cars try to run Barry and Helena off the road, and men attack them with guns and iron pipes. But the book ultimately focuses on the fantastical when Helena’s true nature slowly comes to light. Readers are likely to work out Helena’s secret well before Barry has a clue—although he has an excuse, as love evidently makes him much less perceptive. The couple’s burgeoning romance serves the novel well, particularly since the story retains an underlying threat: It isn’t easy to trust Helena when she lies about whom she knows. Other substantial characters include Stefan Jankovic, a Serbian whose warmonger father was killed by Croatians; and Stanley Egor, an expert marksman on Barry and Adrian’s investigative team who stands more than seven feet tall and tips the scales at 300-plus pounds. Like any good detective novel, Barry’s first-person narration is droll and cynical; when he fights a bad guy within arms’ reach, he notes that “his [arms] were longer,” and before a particularly stellar action scene, he checks his holster to make sure he’d “remembered to fill it with pistol.” The novel doesn’t require readers to have already read the series’ first book—but it will make them want to do so.
An exemplary continuation of Safflind’s mystery-thriller series.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475200119
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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