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
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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