A gripping, testosterone-laced spy thriller with a continent-jumping plot.
An elite CIA team must stop assassins from killing assets and agents in this novel.
In Ceroni’s fourth page-turner starring Dave McClure, two longtime Russian double agents working for the CIA meet grisly ends on foreign soil. These assets were not “in the black,” meaning they were not free of surveillance. Jack Barrett, the CIA director, brings in top agent McClure—who thinks “outside the box”—to help halt the loss of key double agents. But soon after McClure joins the team, death comes directly to Langley Center: John Freeman, one of the CIA’s own, tries to gun down Barrett. Freeman fails in his mission, but he does kill one co-worker and wounds another who attempts to save the big boss. Just before the shooting spree, Freeman became entranced by a black diamond pattern on his computer monitor. After the shooting, another agent—the “eye-catching” Katya Hubbard—also sees a hypnotic diamond pattern on her monitor. It’s revealed that the pattern’s “diamonds can, through their different, highlighted facets, manipulate a person’s subconscious mind” to commit evil. The plan is to scrub the entire agency for moles and damaging software, and agents are asked to identify any irreplaceable assets that need to be extracted from service. One name surfaces: Dr. Armand Mishenkov, the scientist leading Russia’s cold fusion research effort. Mishenkov wishes to defect; the United States wants to help him; and Russia intends to keep him: Cue the violence. Bloodshed fuels this exciting, deftly plotted nail-biter. Blood and/or brain matter sprays, drips, smears, spurts, oozes, slides, ejects, splatters, and pools in the international tale. Although usually a gun is used to do the damage, in a pinch, a shoe or even a toaster can be wielded. The author’s past career in espionage and counterespionage investigation lends a lot of credibility to the fast-paced story with a clever protagonist. The dialogue is serviceable but not inspiring.
A gripping, testosterone-laced spy thriller with a continent-jumping plot.Pub Date: March 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-97-724015-6
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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