While not thematically deep, this first installment in a series featuring Stryker delivers testosterone-driven escapist...
A California physician investigates a politician’s death in this debut thriller that incorporates military and medical elements.
Wyatt Stryker—a former Navy SEAL and current San Diego emergency room doctor—is U.S. Sen. Mark Ripp’s personal physician and security consultant. While vacationing with the senator at his beach home in Mexico, Stryker catches a burglar and almost gets killed in the process. When he returns home with his wife, they’re both anxiously looking forward to reuniting with his 10-year old son, Blake, but the couple discover the babysitter tied up and the boy missing. Soon after, Stryker finds out that the senator—an iconic political figure who was being touted as a potential presidential candidate—has unexpectedly died, allegedly from an accidental overdose of pills. Stryker enlists the help of his longtime buddy Navy SEAL Commander Javier Alcaraz (“Javier and I had been through a lot. He was unbelievably intelligent and had a quiet strength, both physically and mentally. He was the best soldier I’d ever known and the best friend I’d ever had”). Stryker believes the senator was murdered but has no suspects (“Who’d want to kill Mark? He was a moderate, a rare animal these days”). Seeking to locate and rescue Blake before it’s too late, Javier and Stryker begin a perilous quest to tie together the seemingly unconnected events. Russell (Miracles and Mayhem in the ER, 2013) is a former ER doctor, and there is much to like about his pedal-to-the-metal novel; the character development is strong and the plot intricate. But the most noteworthy narrative element turns out to be the author’s obsessive focus on pacing and action. The conflict (both psychological and physical) in this 400-plus-page novel never flags, making it virtually impossible to put down. Additionally, the action scenes aren’t overdone (as is the case in many comparable reads); they’re realistically choreographed, fitting organically into the storyline. Another element of note is Stryker’s main nemesis, the assassin Behram. The author seems to take great pleasure in not only creating a nightmare-inducing villain, but also devising the various ways he receives his karmic comeuppance. This page-turner is a perfect read for armchair adrenaline junkies.
While not thematically deep, this first installment in a series featuring Stryker delivers testosterone-driven escapist literature at its best: fast, furious, and fun.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943425-37-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Elevate Fiction
Review Posted Online: May 25, 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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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