A complex and atmospheric thriller—perhaps not the best jumping-on point but a satisfying entry in a standout historical...
The troubled and troubling Inspector Pekkala returns from exile to find himself trapped between giants at the end of World War II.
For U.S. readers, this may be a confusing relaunch of a dynamic World War II spy series, but it’s bound to make those new to Eastland (Archive 17, 2012, etc.) seek out his other books. To clarify: This is the fifth Inspector Pekkala novel, released by new publisher OPUS, but the fourth book in the series, The Red Moth, will be published after this one. Add to the confusion the fact that British spy novelist Eastland has been newly revealed as a pseudonym for American literary novelist Paul Watkins (Ice Soldier, 2005, etc.), and it all gets a bit murky. To catch up, Inspector Pekkala is a Holmes-ian fellow who was once personal detective to Czar Nicholas II and now reluctantly works for the Communists. As the book begins circa 1944, Pekkala has disappeared at the Western front and is presumed dead. Refusing to believe the inspector has perished, Josef Stalin assigns Pekkala’s best friend and assistant, Maj. Kirov, to seek him out. While Kirov searches for Pekkala, Eastland also unfolds the eerie tale of William Vasko, a New Jersey steelworker who comes to Russia in 1936 seeking work and becomes trapped behind the growing veil of Soviet secrecy. When Pekkala surfaces, he's stalked by an icy German assassin who wants personal revenge, and he joins forces with a partisan warlord in an attempt to mitigate the bloody violence between the Russians and the partisan movement in the Ukraine. In a smart move, Eastland depicts his fictional Stalin as more than a James Bond villain, painting him as a conflicted, lonely tyrant whose retribution against slights both real and imagined makes him a very dangerous opponent.
A complex and atmospheric thriller—perhaps not the best jumping-on point but a satisfying entry in a standout historical series.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62316-049-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: OPUS
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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