Another franchise in the Nick Stone industry.
Ex–Special Forces member McNab (Last Light, 2002, etc.), back in a fifth outing, continues his career of vicarious mayhem.
It’s one last assassination for British ex-pat, Bond-heir apparent, superspy-assassin Nick Stone—who doesn’t know why the Algerian convenience-store king Zeralda needs to die and doesn’t really care. After all, he’s a “K” who works on deniable missions for the Intelligence Service, and “I’d always tried to turn my back on the guilt, remorse, and self-doubt that always followed a job.” Nick brings Zeralda’s head home and doesn’t say a word. Will he now be able to put all that behind him and become a barman or a tour guide, get his US citizenship, and please the two women in his life, the love interest and the semi-estranged daughter? Fugeddaboudit. It takes only the knowledge that Zeralda was mixed up with Al Qaeda (not to mention little boys) to bring our hero back to action tout de suite (“Today was the day the covert three-man team I commanded was about to take the war to Al Qaeda”). He vaults back into his world of intrigue and gadgetry, working with men who are used to jabbering in Arabic on the Net (but he’ll manage) and encountering characters with names like Hubba Hubba, Leather Girl, and Goatee. And when the mission’s all over, the dirty bomb thwarted, etc., Hubba Hubba is quick to remind Nick that he wouldn’t want to be a barman anyway, and superspies were sort of a family, weren’t they? “I couldn’t be a student or a bartender,” Nick concedes. “I couldn’t do anything other than what I did.” McNab may be slipping a bit here in trying to churn out product to match the times: it’s up-to-date enough to refer to Mr. And Mrs. B. entertaining heads of state with Tex-Mex while bombs fall in Afghanistan. Still, McNab is as obsessed with detail as always.
Another franchise in the Nick Stone industry.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-0630-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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