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
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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