A solid cat-and-mouse thriller with a refreshing breakout character.
A compromised CIA agent makes a dangerous trek west while his stateside handler searches for answers.
In Lebanon, CIA deep cover specialist Marc Portman barely escapes an attack by an unsteady sniper. Acting quickly, Portman, who narrates his chapters in a gritty first-person, skillfully takes out his would-be Russian assassin and is rewarded by finding a picture of himself on the corpse. At that point, the tale embarks on a round-the-world circuit from Beirut to Moscow, where Konstantin Basalayev expresses frustration at the failed mission, to Langley, Virginia, where Portman’s CIA handler, Brian Callahan, expresses frustration that he’s the only one concerned with Portman’s safety. Portman’s rescue in Lebanon has come from a most unlikely source: middle-aged British operative Isobel Hunt, formerly with MI6, now an independent contractor with Her Majesty’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Just as she scoops up Portman and drives him to a safe house in a hijacked jeep, the maverick Isobel also hijacks and galvanizes Magson’s conventional plot and familiar characters. And Magson knows it: He credits “the real Isobel Hunt” in his acknowledgements. Sadly, after getting Portman safely to Cyprus, Isobel exits the story. In her place, Portman connects with CIA agent Lindsay Citera, but a key question nags Callahan: Who’s the CIA mole endangering Portman’s life? Writing with a crisp authority that’s both familiar and involving, Magson builds tension steadily. This author of three action series should consider a spinoff for the singular Ms. Hunt.
A solid cat-and-mouse thriller with a refreshing breakout character.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-5027-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Nail-biting and pressure-packed.
Jack Ryan Jr. and company race to stop a killer wave in this Tom Clancy thriller.
The ship Meridian Star departs eastern Russia unknowingly carrying a pair of containers with radioactive cesium chloride. The vessel is hijacked and scuttled in Micronesia near the Mariana Trench, and the crew is murdered. A huge insurance claim results, and Jack, an accomplished deep-sea diver who works for Hendley Associates, is there to investigate. The hostile Chinese learn it’s there and want that illicit cargo. Meanwhile, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center discovers a huge, mysterious object in 600 feet of water. At that depth, the pressure is unsurvivable without complex special equipment, which is vintage Tom Clancy. Whatever the strange object is, it’s “not a ship…not a submarine…not an aircraft.” On the side is a faded hammer and sickle and Cyrillic letters that spell Siren. Ryan teams up with Navy divers, and they look for a way to safely enter and explore the object. They discover that the underwater contraption has thermonuclear warheads attached, left and long forgotten by the USSR. If the warheads explode, they could still achieve their apparent purpose—to trigger a tsunami and destroy Guam, which is strategically important to the U.S. The Chinese know it too, and the race is on to take control. The result is plenty of high-stakes undersea action, where death can come from a bullet, a knife, or a sliced air hose. But there’s action on land, too. Navy master diver Carla Bennett and Jack take on a surprise assault in a hotel where Carla shows off stellar fighting skills—better than Jack’s. These two aren’t the only heroes here, as there’s a well-balanced cast of characters, all brave and likable. And of course—of course—where there’s a bomb, there’s a ticking clock.
Nail-biting and pressure-packed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9798217183166
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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