The criminal mastermind manages to be both repellent and uninteresting, and it’s hard to root for anyone, including Sam,...
Nothing in Sam Capra’s three short years in the CIA could have prepared him for the series of high-stakes conspiracies he’s encountered since then (The Last Minute, 2012, etc.), including this tale of a ruthless Mephisto who promises to fulfill his minions’ dreams if only they’ll kill at his command.
Since getting forced out of the CIA, Sam Capra, 26, has opened dozens of bars around the world. So it’s actually statistically likely that he’d be sitting in one of them, San Francisco’s The Select, when a pair of strangers tries to kill a young woman before his eyes. Ever chivalrous, Sam comes to Diana Keene’s aid, and by the end of the episode, Grigori Rostov is dead and Glenn Marchbanks seriously wounded. Diana’s troubles spring from those of her mother, whose successful public relations firm is founded on a fateful deal she cut with John Belias, a modern-day Prince of Darkness. For a price to be named later, Belias arranges through his network of intermediaries for the failure of his associates’ business rivals. In Janice Keene’s case, the current price is the assassination of three well-known figures in Portland, Las Vegas and Chicago. Though her oncologist has already pronounced her death sentence, Janice soldiers on in the fatuous hope of leaving her daughter a better life. Diana begins to make inquiries that bring her to the attention of Belias’ other assassins. And this is just for starters. There’ll be many more betrayals, double crosses, noble/dumb sacrificial gestures, orders from A to B to eliminate C, false suspicions that specific killers have killed people that they don’t happen to have killed and, the most original feature here, violent deaths of people readers thought were keepers.
The criminal mastermind manages to be both repellent and uninteresting, and it’s hard to root for anyone, including Sam, when everyone’s basically under compulsion to eliminate everyone else. Maybe Abbott and his hapless hero should move on to a new formula.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2843-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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