An action-packed thriller featuring sturdy characters.
The third installment in Dugan’s (Irrevocable Resolution, 2016, etc.) series finds CIA operative Capt. Alan Joubert facing off against a corrupt, U.S.-funded military unit.
After narrowly surviving his last assignment, Alan has a new CIA handler in the Absolute Resolution program. Taking out cocaine labs and ammunition-stocked warehouses has made him a target in Central and South America, where he typically works, so the agency plans on shifting him to the Middle East and Asia Pacific. But first, he must take out leaders of the Contras in Costa Rica, a military unit financed by the U.S. government. These leaders are reportedly working with a drug cartel and committing war crimes in Nicaragua; soon, Alan is shocked when he witnesses Contra troopers savagely attacking villagers. After he completes his mission, he’s still uncertain that he eliminated the corruption entirely, so, with a few friends, he returns to Costa Rica with CIA support. It soon becomes clear that someone has information about his team, leading to startling deaths and a direct assault against Alan himself. Like earlier installments, Dugan’s novel is episodic (with an unrelated Taipei mission), but it’s primarily concentrated on the Contras. Alan and his cohorts—Rene, Fast Eddie, and Wild Bill, all of whom he’s known since Vietnam—are efficient and disciplined during operations, and the author meticulously details their gear and aspects of their stealth procedures, such as their use of hand signals. Lynn, Alan’s partner in Taipei, is the series’ strongest female character yet—a proficient Chinese-American agent who speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and Korean. Dugan wisely caters to new readers by offering background info on returning characters, although the story’s 1980s setting won’t be immediately apparent until the appearance of antiquated technology, such as pagers and a cassette player. The ending leaves open the possibility of a sequel, but there’s enough closure to end the series as a trilogy.
An action-packed thriller featuring sturdy characters.Pub Date: July 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5472-7650-9
Page Count: 178
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
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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