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
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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