A lumpy tale with a retro baddie and too many subplots, but still a step up from Illegal Action (2008). Maybe Liz, who’s...
Who’s trying to torpedo the latest round of Mideast peace talks?
According to Peter Templeton, head of MI6’s Cyprus station, a trusted source has told him that two men, Lebanese importer Sami Veshara and freelance journalist Chris Marcham, plan to subvert the peace conference scheduled at a quiet Scottish shooting resort and cast the blame on Syria. The questions for Liz Carlyle and her counter-espionage colleagues in MI5 are clear: Is the intelligence credible? If it is, what exactly is the nature of the threat? What motives do the two accused conspirators have? Finally, given the stakes of the conference, should MI5 let Syria’s secret service deal with the alleged plotters, or protect and interrogate them? But none of these questions is easy to answer because, in Liz’s world, nothing is quite what it seems. Marcham’s relationship with Alexander Ledingham, who’s fascinated with churches, has a dark side. American divorcée Hannah Gold’s new friendship with Israeli trade attaché Danny Kollek bears closer examination. Aleppo, the hot new intelligence source for Ben Ahmad, of Syrian counter-terrorism, is more mysterious and powerful than any source Ahmad has used before. The wires are crossed between Andy Bokus, the head of the CIA’s London office, and Charles Wetherby, Liz’s boss at MI5, but not for the reasons they think. Liz is even wrong about Edward Treglown, the new man in her mother’s life. Sorting through the thicket of plots and red herrings—some planted by a devious and manipulative villain, others less forgivably tossed in by Rimington herself—Liz, together with her friend Peggy Kinsolving and debonair Miles Brookhaven of the CIA, identifies the likely source of the trouble just in time for the obligatory action-packed showdown in the Scottish hills.
A lumpy tale with a retro baddie and too many subplots, but still a step up from Illegal Action (2008). Maybe Liz, who’s certainly earned it, needs some time to herself.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-27254-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
© 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
