Throat-clutching action, authentic scenarios, spectacular precision. Death zings its old sweet song as slugs sing off your...
A sweet one. McNab writes like a dream, having produced fiction (Remote Control and Crisis Four, neither reviewed) and nonfiction about Britain’s Special Air Service. He retired in 1993 as the British Army’s most highly decorated serving soldier.
Nick Stone, McNab’s stand-in, has a rich backstory by now: His nine-year-old adoptive daughter’s mental troubles cost him $4,000 weekly, and he must survive the Firm’s black view of his debacles at the White House and elsewhere. So he takes on a bloody task that at first looks easy: to set up a snatch in Helsinki and bring a visiting Russian Mafia kingpin to St. Petersburg. Should he slip up, ROC (Russian Organized Crime) will treat him to Viking’s Revenge—disembowelment, with his innards squirming on his chest for him to mull over during his half hour spent dying. The kingpin, Valentin Lebed, and other ROC members launder £20 billion yearly through London banks, and some London banking execs want Val shipped off to St. Petersburg, where he can be persuaded to make even sweeter deals with them. McNab’s wiser fans, feeling slightly above the low mental power of Nick’s Russian helpmates, will soon foresee a tangle-footed, ruinous orgy in the kidnap. Or as Nick thinks, “Basically, I accepted that I was going to die, and anything beyond that was a bonus.” As always, the snatch goes bad—very bad—and Nick winds up changing teams when offered a London payoff from Lebed, now his vastly wealthy prisoner. In London, Lebed pays him $100 trillion, then hires him to get a hacker into a Finnish house to download a “commercial” program for a payoff of an additional $3 million in a Luxembourg account. The program? Well, it’s the “Echelon dictionaries,” McNab’s Maltese Falcon.
Throat-clutching action, authentic scenarios, spectacular precision. Death zings its old sweet song as slugs sing off your Kevlar.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-0626-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.
An original take on a familiar pop-culture motif.
The “final girl” is a trope familiar to film scholars and horror-movie fans. She’s the young woman who makes it out of the slasher flick alive, the one who lives to tell the tale. After she survives a mass murder, the media tries to make Quincy into a final girl, but she refuses to play that part. Instead, she finishes college, finds a great boyfriend, and builds a comfortable life for herself on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s managed to bury her trauma under a mountain of Pinterest-ready sweets—she runs a successful baking blog—and psychological repression. Then another final girl, a woman who's tried to be a mentor to Quincy, dies of an apparent suicide, and the cracks in her carefully constructed world begin to show. Reporters come looking for her. So does Samantha Boyd, another survivor. It’s clear that Sam is trouble, but precisely what kind of trouble is one of the mysteries of this inventive, well-crafted thriller. Quincy might look like a model survivor, but that’s only because she’s managed to conceal both her reliance on Xanax and her penchant for petty theft. Quincy is convinced that she and Sam can help each other, but Sam’s bad habits mesh a little too neatly with Quincy’s own. As she begins to lose control, Quincy starts to doubt Sam as she gets ever closer to truths she’s managed to suppress. While most of the book is written from the heroine’s point of view, Sager weaves scenes from the night Quincy’s friends were slaughtered into the narrative. This is a clever device in that it gives readers information that Quincy can’t access even as it invites readers to question her claims of memory loss. Also, knowing the outcome of this horrible event makes watching it unfold nerve-wracking. This is not to say that readers can feel secure about knowing what they think they know. Sager does an excellent job throughout of keeping the audience guessing until the final twist.
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98536-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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