QUILLER BALALAIKA

Name: QUILLER BALALAIKA
Author: Adam Hall
ISBN: 0-7867-1265-1

by Adam Hall ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2003

Now that James Bond has been turned over to the special-effects department, Quiller’s last testament, more than any sign...

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Superspy Quiller’s 19th and final appearance, which sets him against the most evil man in Russia, might have come out of a time capsule.

And in a sense it did, since this yarn, finished shortly before Hall’s death in 1995 and published in the UK the following year, makes its first US appearance only now. The franchise may be showing its age—the old Soviet Union’s back broken, Russia is hanging in the balance between Yeltsin and Zhirinovsky—but Quiller himself is no more world-weary than he was in the adventures that stretched from The Quiller Memorandum (1966) to Quiller Salamander (1994). And his reputation precedes him. Croder, the Chief of Signals who briefs him in-country, knows he’s the only agent with a prayer of bringing down Mafiya kingpin Vasyl Sakkas, who’s been dealing body blows to the nation’s infant free-market economy, in what looks like a suicide mission. When Quiller asks, “What toys will I get?,” he doesn’t mean the custom suits, the Barclay gold card, the Heckler and Koch P7, the million dollars; he’s asking who’ll run him in the field. And the answer comes up trumps: premier field director Ferris will be pulled off another op, and legendary Croder himself will supervise. But as Quiller inches his way toward Sakkas by means of Vishinsky, a midlevel Mafiyosa called the Cobra, and Natalya Anatova, a prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, his handlers begin to back away from the operation, and when they threaten to shut it down, Quiller threatens to go to ground to get the goods, or the drop, on Vasyl Sakkas by himself. If the ending seems a bit abrupt after all the complications, a pair of affecting codas explains why.

Now that James Bond has been turned over to the special-effects department, Quiller’s last testament, more than any sign short of le Carré’s adieux, marks the passing of an era.

Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-7867-1265-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

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QUILLER SALAMANDER
by Adam Hall

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QUILLER MERIDIAN
by Adam Hall

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QUILLER SOLITAIRE
by Adam Hall

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
EVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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THREE BAGS FULL

A SHEEP DETECTIVE STORY

by Leonie Swann & translated by Anthea Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 5, 2007

All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...

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Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.

For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.

All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.