An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.
Ex–Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and ex–FBI agent Valerie Mayberry, each disgraced in their respective field, go outside of official channels to avert a devastating threat to the United States.
The murder of an Iranian scientist who lived in a condo down the hall from Garrett primes the plot of this geopolitical thriller, which involves a criminally connected Russian oil billionaire; an evil Iranian general who was "conceived in a brutal rape"; a Palestinian father-daughter assassination team out to avenge the killing of the rest of their family in an Israeli bombing; and an Islamic terrorist recruited by Iran to detonate a nuclear device on a "ghost" submarine off the coast of Virginia. Back from Gingrich and Earley's Collusion (2019), Brett and Valerie are quite the duo. He is an opioid-addicted Afghanistan and black ops veteran whose torture/murder of Russian general Andre Gromyko (Gingrich's backhanded salute to the late, real-life Soviet foreign minister?) led to his ouster from the SEALs. She is an obsessive, oxycodone-popping beauty (her partner thinks she resembles Keri Russell of TV's The Americans, but she acts more like Claire Danes on Homeland) who has to cope with permanent nerve damage from a gas attack on the U.S. Senate. Though the authors are happy to install a naïve president with the name Randle Fitzgerald, their political commentary is largely restrained—Fitzgerald's party affiliation is not revealed. This is, at its best, an action thriller, with a full share of bang-up scenes (and at least one torture too many). And though former House Speaker Gingrich and Earley have a nagging tendency to have characters verbalize plot details (as in "Remind me, Petrov, how many fights did you win before we were released?" and "You mean, before your father bribed three judges to erase our crimes?"), they keep the story afloat.
An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-286019-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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