A thriller as straight as an arrow, even when mildly deflected by the winds of conscience. The ending leaves much...
Freelance assassin Rain, now an established presence on the thriller scene (Rain Storm, 2004, etc.), confronts both menace and morality.
“Killing isn’t the hard part . . . Christ, an ape could do it. Getting close to the target, though, that takes some talent.” Rain has that talent in abundance, especially when the death has to look natural. Here, he’s hired by the Israelis to extinguish a national who is selling his designer-bomb-making talents to terrorist networks. The hitch is that the target may be a CIA asset, and the Israelis don’t want to incur the agency’s wrath, so they need an unaffiliated party to do the job. But Rain’s best-laid plans unravel when a child enters the assassination scene—he won’t harm women or children—and the Israelis come stalking him, afraid he’ll expose their intentions and anger their American benefactors. The action sequences are straightforward, with plenty of nitty-gritty tactical material for those who enjoy special ops work, while Eisler never clutters his story with red herrings or circuitous plotlines. Still, for the first time in any extended fashion, he makes Rain take stock of his vocation. He kills truly heinous figures for a living, but he starts to wonder why his solutions always involve violence. His brand of nihilism is beginning to taste like ashes in his mouth, and the line is blurring between his acts and those of the madmen he’s hired to whack. Eisler doesn’t burden the story with these musings, but lets them pass like a veil over the action. And plenty of good action there is, involving Rain’s old friends Dox, his ex-Marine sniper friend, and Delilah, the honey-pot agent for the Israeli secret service, both returning to give Rain even more of a human face.
A thriller as straight as an arrow, even when mildly deflected by the winds of conscience. The ending leaves much unanswered, so, thankfully, expect more Rain.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15284-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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