by Allan V. Cotter ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2015
A crafty, quick-witted thriller that champions humanity over national boundaries.
In Cotter’s debut thriller, a private eye clashes with an international cartel that has harnessed invisibility technology.
After lecturing to graduates at a university job fair in West Virginia, retired psychiatrist José Maxwell-Sanders is killed. Private investigator William Horner, who works for members of the United Nations Security Council, is there to learn more. He teams up with Dr. Art Bradbury—who saw Maxwell-Sanders as a father figure—and discovers that Maxwell-Sanders had an obsession with global conspiracies. Later, the pair is summoned to Toronto, where they investigate a safe-deposit box belonging to the late doctor. Fresh clues lead them to Dr. Rose Chrysler, a specialist in photonics, who confirms helping Maxwell-Sanders research the way light bends. Meanwhile, news of a deadly stage collapse in Texas spreads on television, and Art learns that mysterious military personnel surveyed the scene with clipboards. At their hotel, Horner and Bradbury receive an anonymous tip about a planned demonstration of invisibility that will cause chaos in London. While a shadowy group toys with the investigators, two sadistic assassins follow, murdering loose ends along the way. Soon, Horner and Bradbury end up in one of the most volatile places on Earth—the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Cotter maintains a moody atmosphere of paranoia; characters are often recorded audibly and visually; and eventually Horner admits, “We are being led by the nose and teased or we wouldn’t have gotten this far.” The villains generally remain a vague cluster of government and military types, except for Gen. Leon Judy, a key player in orchestrating public uses of the invisibility technology, who makes several big reveals late in the novel. Cotter’s prose is smooth, except when he uses terms like “else-ware” and “all most.” Overall, his tale of global manipulation resonates deeply in an era of constant surveillance and government data breaches.
A crafty, quick-witted thriller that champions humanity over national boundaries.Pub Date: June 4, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 188
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Kathy Reichs
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