An unsparing and richly atmospheric international thriller.
A man and woman flee Istanbul on a desperate trek to freedom in this novel.
As the narrative commences, Kemal Yilmaz, a former agent in Turkey’s Central Intelligence agency who’s enduring a snowstorm in Istanbul, is a worried man. His lover, Nadiye, is missing, presumably entangled in the chaos following the military coup that’s convulsed the country and left a cabal of generals in control. And that group’s ascendancy has made Kemal and all of his ex-colleagues hunted fugitives, ensnared in a deadly Catch-22. They were officially ordered to resign, knowing if they obeyed they could be arrested for treason. If they refused, they could be detained for disobeying the order. Caught in this same bind is Nadiye’s sister, Shirin, who, as the renowned exotic dancer Nejla Ateş, is “a femme fatale no one in Turkey could match.” Former agents like Kemal and Shirin are now “ilgisiz,” irrelevant. To make matters worse, Shirin has been coerced into one more mission: to use her feminine wiles on two Russian military officers in order to learn their plans regarding Turkey. Her recruiter is a man named Hakan Chatli, a menacing political hit man who’s been known to quote Turkish poetry while killing his victims. Though Kemal and Shirin had been mere acquaintances and political opposites, they agree to follow a mad, improvised plan to flee Turkey and head overland all the way east to Sinjiang province in China, where he has family. Shirin is skeptical: They have forged documentation, no help, and Afghanistan is under Soviet rule after an invasion. In addition, Pakistan’s prime minister has just been executed. And there’s the added threat of Hakan personally hunting Shirin down, no matter how far from Turkey she flees.
From these simple elements—a country suffering turmoil; two ex-agents making a run for a new life—Wittenborn crafts a surprisingly powerful story. All of the book’s many characters—particularly Kemal and Shirin—are drawn with minimal brush strokes and a complete lack of sentimentality. At one point, onboard a vessel in the Black Sea, Shirin watches the lights of little villages on shore and is briefly tempted. “I wonder what it’s like to live there,” she muses. “A nice simple life. No complications”—to which Kemal immediately responds: “And, no supermarkets, no phones, no plumbing….We’re creatures of the city.” Their travels are leanly but effectively described, as are the many supporting characters they meet along the way (especially a man named Rustam they encounter in Iran). The author draws out the tension of Shirin’s certainty that Hakan is after her but doesn’t overdo it. Likewise, the unending international conflicts the pair faces, where “every day is a question mark,” are skillfully portrayed—the political and ethnic strife they encounter are described with a knowing economy. The little details of daily existence, the food, the drink, the rhythms, are vividly brought to life, from the wonderfully realized Istanbul in winter to the bazaars and blasted cityscapes of the war-torn countries that Kemal and Shirin must cross in order to reach their destination. And the narrative’s unexpected resolution of its earliest plot question—What happened to Kemal’s lover, Nadiye?—is deftly done.
An unsparing and richly atmospheric international thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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