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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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