Strong, skillful female warriors headline this rousing sequel.
A computer geek teams up with a black ops group to recover superconductive material in this second installment of a thriller series.
After spotting an intruder in her San Francisco loft, Maddy Marshall first protects 10-year-old AJ, the boy she hopes to adopt. Unfortunately, the culprit absconds with the ancient star chart she had been keeping safe. This chart may be the key to recovering a superconductive meteorite, which would fuel a quantum computer. As the thief may have been Russian, it’s a national security risk since the Russians would likely use such a computer for an American invasion. Alfred Bowman, director of VanOps, assigns Maddy’s boyfriend, Bear Thorenson, to find the meteorite as well as investigate the possibly related murder of an Indian ambassador. Joining Bear are VanOps members Jarmilla “Jags” Agiashvili and Maddy’s twin, Will Argones. Maddy becomes part of the team, too. Though only a civilian, she has an aikido black belt and belongs to the Order of the Invisible Flame, an ancient sect of royal spies that her family founded. This mission necessitates enlisting the help of archeoastronomer Anu Kumar; deciphering hieroglyphics on an important relic that Maddy possesses; and dodging tenacious assassins. Maddy and Jags are delightfully capable and convincingly vulnerable characters. But while the two women’s combat scenes are exhilarating, the story ultimately turns into a series of seemingly endless assaults or assassination attempts the team must face. Nevertheless, the final act is decidedly more intense while the brisk narrative traverses the globe to such places as Turkey, Egypt, and Africa. Centrae provides Maddy with numerous dilemmas, as she debates an offer to officially join VanOps (she’s concerned it would put AJ in persistent danger) and deals with Bear’s envy over her ex-fiance, Vincent, who, to some extent, is still in her life.
Strong, skillful female warriors headline this rousing sequel. (author’s notes, acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73496-625-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Thunder Creek Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High marks for this one. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a long series.
Elephants and humans alike face mortal danger in this tense, complex thriller set in Africa.
Tom Klay is an American journalist in Kenya who writes about crimes against endangered species for the National Geographic–like magazine The Sovereign. Because of an earlier article he’d written, a ranger friend tells Klay, “everyone wants to see our famous elephant,” Kenya’s largest. That’s good for tourism, but now criminals want to kill the heavily protected animal and “smuggle his tusks to China whole.” Notorious poacher Ras Botha runs Africa’s ivory trade and considers elephants mere “property” to be hunted at will. “An elephant is carrying two gravestones,” Klay is told: “One for himself. One for his species.” Gravestones are needed for people as well, as Botha takes violent exception to human interference. Klay is a multilayered character who grew up in a funeral home and is well enough acquainted with death to muse that life is an unwinnable case and that “hope was certainty’s flirtatious cousin.” He tells his lover, the wonderfully named career South African prosecutor Hungry Khoza, that he’s not a good person because he’d caused a child’s death in Indonesia. His magazine’s editor-in-chief ropes Klay into moonlighting for the CIA. Then Perseus Group Media, a subsidiary of the “world’s biggest private military company” and China’s overseas security firm, buys out Klay’s financially struggling employer. By the way, China’s “Ultimate Silk Road Project” includes a planned highway through the heart of Kenya. There’s also a treasonous U.S. Navy admiral caught in a “little sex ring” and a pedophile ivory trafficker who is also a peace negotiator. The child sex trafficking theme might have been developed further or omitted altogether, but readers will sense its pervasiveness. The author’s experience as a special investigator for National Geographic informs this fast-moving debut novel.
High marks for this one. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a long series.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18792-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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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