Like most of Liz’s adventures, this one is conscientious and unspectacular, with little suggestion of significant moral or...
In her eighth world-class headache, Liz Carlyle and the rest of MI5 (The Geneva Trap, 2012, etc.) tangle with a ring that deals weapons to the worst kind of people.
As you may have noticed from recent headlines, the Arab Spring didn’t exactly square everything away in the Middle East—certainly not in Liz’s corner of the world. Andy Bokus, head of the CIA in London, delivers the unhappy news that despite the arms embargo to Yemen, someone his agency has code named “Pigot” is smuggling arms there through England, ultimately placing them in the eager hands of jihadis. Even worse, the best intelligence identifies Pigot as Antoine Milraud, a disgraced French ex–intelligence officer whose sense of tradecraft and contacts around the world make him doubly dangerous. Andy’s former deputy, Miles Brookhaven, is patiently extracting information from “Donation,” Yemeni Trade Minister Jamaal Baakrime, but Donation’s leads, slow to come under ideal conditions, grind to a halt when his son is killed. So the best hope for Liz and her French and American counterparts is to stay on Milraud’s tail even though their elusive target is equally slow to incriminate himself or anyone else. Can it get any worse? Indeed it can. The longer Liz stays on the case, the more convinced she becomes that James McManus, Deputy Head of Special Branch in Greater Manchester, is in cahoots with unsavory club owner Lester Jackson, who’s expanding his interests from drugs and prostitution to the arms trade. Liz’s fling with James McManus, who befriended and bedded her when she was seconded long ago to the Merseyside Police, didn’t end well, but she never imagined he’d cross this line. The concatenation of evil threatens not only the new world order, but Liz’s nearest and dearest.
Like most of Liz’s adventures, this one is conscientious and unspectacular, with little suggestion of significant moral or psychological depths below the professionalism. Rimington’s biggest talent lies in her uncanny knack for choosing the hot-button issues to hang her stories on.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 9781620406168
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
