A promising start to a complex new black-ops thriller series.
Daniel Petrovich, a former operative in the Department of Defense’s top-secret Black Flag program, is recalled to duty in this launch of a new thriller series.
Brandishing an ax and soon to butcher the wheelchair-bound brother of a Serbian crime boss, Marko Resja—aka Daniel Petrovich, a deep-cover American operative working under the direction of Gen. Terrence Sanderson—muses that this assassination will soon set him free. Six years later, Petrovich, happily married to Jessica and working at a semiconductor company in Maine, receives a call for “Marko”—and a new mission from Sanderson. Petrovich resists until the name Zorana Zekulic is mentioned, then he executes the directive to kill a nearby Muslim businessman. Petrovich’s hit is one of eight coordinated assassinations that together take down an FBI operation tracking al-Qaida funding. The FBI and CIA soon connect the killings to Sanderson, uncovering the now-retired general’s rogue and apparently reactivated Black Flag program. CIA assistant director Karl Berg deploys his own covert team to grab Petrovich, since, as Marko, his beheading of a CIA agent is among the crimes. Obeying yet always distrusting Sanderson, Petrovich flees Maine to meet up with his former boss, hoping all the while he’ll be able to contact and start a new life with Jessica. U.S. Naval Academy graduate Konkoly (The Jakarta Pandemic, 2010) has crafted a well-paced thriller that sets his new series in motion, providing entertaining plot twists, nifty evasion techniques and a healthy dose of cynicism about government agencies. The array of secondary characters can get a bit dizzying at times, making the cheat-sheet list the author provides particularly helpful. Prime mover Sanderson’s motivations remain somewhat murky, but perhaps more will be revealed in future installments. Hero Petrovich also has plenty of potential, with more to explore regarding his existential qualities (reminiscent of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne), his rather unexpressed romantic yearnings and his shockingly unapologetic execution of extremely violent acts.
A promising start to a complex new black-ops thriller series.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466417601
Page Count: 310
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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