An arresting conclusion to the Eve Duncan trilogy.
After an explosive showdown in Colorado among the CIA, Eve Duncan's loved ones and a furious Jim Doane, Eve is Doane’s captive again, but the stakes are higher than anyone imagined, and getting Eve to safety is shadowed by an even deadlier threat.
Renowned forensic sculptor Eve is captive again to evil Jim Doane. Doane set up an intricate escape amid a fiery explosion in a Colorado ghost town and is convinced he’s fooled everyone into thinking he and Eve are both dead. However, Eve’s loved ones—her lover, Joe Quinn, her adopted daughter, Jane, and an assorted group of smart, well-connected allies—have figured out they are alive. They are also suspicious of the CIA, whom Eve works for and yet who seem more concerned with taking Doane out than in rescuing Eve. Gathering clues while keeping under Doane’s radar screen, they are confronted with the horrifying reason the CIA—and their contact, Agent Venable—is less concerned with Eve’s welfare than they are: Doane’s deceased son, Kevin, left two armed nuclear weapons somewhere in the U.S., and the CIA believes Doane will set them off. Doane is out for revenge and has abducted Eve to recreate his son’s skull, believing that making that happen will bring Kevin back to life somehow. However, Eve also has a surprising connection to Zander, the man responsible for Kevin’s death, and Doane is using her as bait to draw the enigmatic assassin to her rescue. Meanwhile, Jane and her friends realize that Doane isn’t actually the person behind the destructive Grand Plan. They must race a ticking time bomb to discover the whereabouts of the detonator and the weapons and keep Eve and two major metropolitan areas safe. The novel offers a multilayered plot with a long cast of characters Johansen fans will recognize from the first two books in the trilogy as well as other series. The continued sexual tension between Jane and her two would-be lovers ratchets up to a surprising conclusion, and the intriguing hints at ghostly help and psychic talent to solve the many mysteries add texture, romance and enigma to a taut, compelling storyline.
An arresting conclusion to the Eve Duncan trilogy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02002-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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