A spy novel that has moments of brilliance but inspires incredulity more than excitement.
A Lutheran pastor attempts to expose the persecution of Christians in Iran.
Stephen Grant isn’t your typical Lutheran pastor—he’s also a former Navy SEAL and CIA agent who still accepts clandestine missions for the United States. Grant realizes the absurdity of his life, one which only makes sense in the cinematic world of action adventures: “There aren’t too many of my fellow Lutheran pastors who wind up in the situations that I do.” Sometimes, Grant’s missions come directly from President Adam Links, to whom Grant serves as a kind of spiritual adviser. An organization Grant works with—the Lutheran Response to Christian Persecution—produces a documentary exposing the brutal persecution of Christians by the Iranian government. In order to uncover the prison where Christians are being held and rescue its victims, Grant joins forces with Caldwell, Driessen and McEnany International Strategies and Security, a firm led by Paige Caldwell, a former CIA partner and romantic flame. Paige is now secretly engaged to President Links. In the aftermath of their successful mission, the crew is invited to Jordan to meet with its royal family—the recently crowned King Salama seems eager to showcase his own progressive brand of Muslim nationalism and make common cause against Iran. However, internecine disputes within the royal family eventually endanger Grant and his colleagues, a predicament lucidly portrayed by Keating. The plot is vigorously paced, crammed with vividly depicted action and drama. And despite its convolutions—there are simply too many entangled subplots—the reader is never lost in this accessible tale of international intrigue. Yet the novel is also a tapestry of pulp paperback tropes as implausible as they are formulaic—only within this peculiar genre of popular literature does one find caricatures like Grant. A lack of believability makes the latest installment of a running series a bit of a chore.
A spy novel that has moments of brilliance but inspires incredulity more than excitement.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2022
ISBN: 9798356500374
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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