A riveting spy tale that delivers a CIA hero fighting Islamic terrorists.
A debut thriller features a CIA officer who must stop a terrorist attack.
In Paris, a van carrying two “briefcase-size parcels” to the U.S. Embassy is ambushed, sparking an international crisis. The driver of the van is beheaded in the assault, suggesting merciless terrorists are involved. Enter American Tom Rivers, a CIA officer who formerly worked in Army intelligence. With his Luminox watch and ability to take a beating in the line of duty, he’s tasked with figuring out what’s going on. He meets a “smart, beautiful and dangerous” woman named Raz Jackson in Paris. Raz is a former CIA agent who uses her old connections to provide upscale hotels and businesses with security systems. Raz and Rivers hit it off, but there’s still plenty of perilous work to be done. It soon becomes apparent that terrorists are planning an attack in the United States. A key conspirator is an American-born woman and former FBI/CIA asset called Susan Owens, who took classes in Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky and now goes by the name Umm al-Nasr. In college, she befriended many people from the Middle East and wound up keeping an eye on them for the FBI. But she became radicalized while spending time in Damascus. She eventually married a top-ranking Islamic State terrorist known as Omar the Chechen, who was subsequently killed in a 2017 airstrike. Umm now has vengeance on her mind. She has no qualms about training girls to become suicide bombers and working with an unsavory Chechen named Dogu Matsoy, who aims to be the next Osama bin Laden. It will take concerted efforts by people like Rivers and Raz to prevent extensive bloodshed.
Naturally, Rivers encounters trouble wherever he goes in McQuay’s energetic tale. The dangers include all sorts of violent attacks, ranging from an attempted garroting in Odessa to a shootout in Tampa. The hero is often up against incredible odds, as when he’s wounded, alone in the Syrian desert, actively pursued by terrorists and “exposed in the open with a short-range AK and a close-contact handgun.” Such moments are undeniably tense. Readers will speculate how Rivers will manage to live to fight another day. What often keeps him alive is his training or what seems to be just plain good luck. Yet the bracing action can be broken up by tedious meetings and bureaucratic hurdles. While the fact that Rivers is not a rampaging gunslinger who can act with impunity whenever he wants lends the story believability, his interactions with his superiors are not always entertaining. Sometimes previous events wind up as bullet points for a report. Take, for example, part of the summation of the crime that begins the book: “Video shows one of the thieves decapitated the courier and other thieves appear agitated by the event.” Readers already know this information, and encountering it again doesn’t add much to the tale. Still, the story offers plenty of gripping scenes. Umm is not the typical Islamic terrorist found in spy thrillers, and she’s highly motivated to boot. Considering her ferocity, readers will wonder what it will take to finally stop her.
A riveting spy tale that delivers a CIA hero fighting Islamic terrorists.Pub Date: April 15, 2024
ISBN: 9798218374808
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Hot Type Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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