A smart, timely thriller weakened only by the abrupt narrative jumps among the decades covered.
Carr (An Accidental American, 2007, etc.) shows a straight-shooting soldier coming up against decades of treachery in America’s intelligence machinery.
This provocative tale of military intelligence gone haywire is marred only by rapid and bewildering shifts of time and territory from the 1970s to the early 2000s, Afghanistan and Spain to Vietnam and Morocco. At the murky center is Jamal, snatched at birth from an unwed Moroccan who had incurred the displeasure of King Hassan’s regime. Fleeing the squalid orphanage where he was dumped, teenaged Jamal managed to make it across the straits to Spain and then into the pipeline leading to Afghanistan in the middle of the war on the Taliban. He was of interest to coalition interrogators there because of the older Iranians with whom he arrived; one of those men died in custody, the other escaped. Jamal’s interrogator was Army specialist Katherine “Kat” Caldwell, a fluent Arabic speaker thanks to her training at the Defense Language Institute. At the time she interrogated Jamal, Kat was involved with one of the Brits who had a hand in the death of Jamal’s Iranian companion. These connections come into play when, years later, Kat is summoned from her civilian job at a military school, ordered back on duty and sent to Spain to find Jamal, who has eluded the agents now on his trail. Why those agents killed Kat’s old boyfriend and why they want to kill Jamal when they find him are secrets only gradually revealed to Kat and the reader as she follows her gut instincts to locate the boy. Neither Jamal nor Kat knows anything about the devils haunting “Mr. Harry,” as Jamal calls the retired spook he went to for help when he realized he was in danger, but Harry Comfort knows that they are up against bad guys entrenched at the heart of the American intelligence machinery, men who want all of them dead.
A smart, timely thriller weakened only by the abrupt narrative jumps among the decades covered.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7709-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Mortalis/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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