by Andy Maslen ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2016
A sometimes-slow series installment, but one that continues to develop its rugged hero.
A former British soldier’s assignment to investigate an experimental drug becomes a hostage-rescue mission in Maslen’s (Trigger Point, 2015) thriller.
Gabriel Wolfe is still tormented by his decision, while he was in the Special Air Service, to leave dead trooper Mickey “Smudge” Smith behind in the Mozambique jungle. While shaken by a vision of Smudge, he sprints out of an art gallery and gets run down by a delivery truck driving on the wrong side of the road. He wakes up from a 19-day coma at a hospital for veterans, his care courtesy of his former commanding officer, Don Webster. Don now runs a counterterrorism unit and wants Gabriel to look into something called “Gulliver,” a performance-enhancing drug that Dreyer Pharma is developing. Military Typhoon pilots who’ve taken the drug, including Gabriel’s hospital roommate Tom Ainsley, have hallucinated and gone blind, and some have died in resultant crashes. The upcoming Farnborough Airshow, during which Dreyer will demonstrate Gulliver, could prove lethal. However, Dreyer CEO James Bryant is staving off any investigations, yielding to demands from Chechen terrorists led by Kasym Drezna, who’s holding James’ wife, Sarah, and daughter, Chloe, captive. Kasym wants the air show to fail in order to discredit the drug, so that the Chechens can make a move against potential Gulliver buyer Oleg Abramov. Man-of-action Gabriel could resolve everything, though, by saving the Bryant women. Maslen introduced Gabriel’s Smudge-related back story in the preceding novel, and this time Gabriel seeks professional help for what’s likely PTSD. It’s a welcome vulnerability for the recurring protagonist, who’s seemingly undefeatable in physical altercations. Gabriel also dabbles in espionage here, adopting the persona “Terry Fox” to inquire covertly about Chechens in Estonia and forming an unsteady alliance with Russian mobster Yuri Volkov. It’s more than halfway into the book before Gabriel considers saving the hostages, but Maslen wisely provides the perspective of Sarah and Chloe, who fight back and attempt escape rather than sit idly by. The story is occasionally plodding, particularly when readers are steps ahead of Gabriel; for example, they’ll easily decipher quick-witted Chloe’s message, which she hides in a video. Nevertheless, the narrative ends by teasing even more adventures for Gabriel in the future.
A sometimes-slow series installment, but one that continues to develop its rugged hero.Pub Date: April 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5307-9972-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tyton Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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