Deeply researched, fast-paced, and believable. Peace be upon John Wells, but only after he’s helped defeat jihad once and...
Another “blood-spatter messy” mission by Muslim CIA freelance operator John Wells (The Wolves, 2016, etc.).
Wells’ ex-girlfriend Anne pegs him perfectly when she says she's “amazed the sun rises every day without you to cart it around.” Certainly the CIA wouldn’t be the same without his heroics. He converted to Islam during a mission in Afghanistan years earlier, and the CIA doubted his loyalty, which he's since proven repeatedly. His religion isn’t political and relates more to his view of Creation than to the Middle East. Now his old boss Ellis Shafer correctly suspects the CIA has a mole feeding information to the Islamic State group, which could be planning a major attack on the West. Wells’ mission, approved by President Vinny Duto, is to go undercover to learn the jihadi plot from an IS terrorist in a Bulgarian prison. He becomes Samir Khalili, a man who “quoted the Quran and hated heroin.” The CIA cooks up a back story that he's an al-Qaida fighter who has been captured in Afghanistan and is now being dumped in the same Bulgarian hellhole. Once he’s there, the guards don’t know his real identity, so they treat him like any other “jihadi scum.” It’s a good thing he’s tough, because the guards dish out serious abuse. But danger is his comfort zone, and he’s never better than when he’s in trouble. Meanwhile, the mole the CIA is looking for, a man who calls himself Wayne (after John Wayne), tries to get info on Wells’ mission to betray him. Wayne thinks the U.S. simply spreads pain around the world and expects “love in return.” The jihadis want weapons of mass destruction and consider weaponizing anthrax, but they decide instead on sarin gas, conducting grisly but successful tests on prisoners. Eventually they obtain enough sarin to kill hundreds of people, and they know just how they’ll do it—by creating “a house of the dead.” As always, Wells proves himself to be tough and smart—he still needs both qualities once he’s sprung from prison.
Deeply researched, fast-paced, and believable. Peace be upon John Wells, but only after he’s helped defeat jihad once and for all. That's sure to extend this fine series.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17615-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
