Devious Charlie Muffin—Freemantle's immensely engaging stormy petrel of British intelligence (Charlie's Apprentice, 1994, etc.)- -proves as clever at thwarting terrorist threats to the New World Order as he ever was at outwitting the West's Cold War foes. Posted to anarchic post-Communist Moscow to monitor the illicit trade in nuclear materials, Charlie reluctantly joins forces with America's resident FBI agent, an eager young beaver named James Kestler. Charlie also establishes contact with Aleksai Popov, operational commander of the Interior Ministry's anti- smuggling unit, which is headed by Natalia Fedova, the ex-KGB operative who loved and lost Charlie after bearing his daughter, Sasha (Comrade Charlie, 1992). Tipped off that a powerful Russian crime family plans to steal radioactive fuel rods from a decommissioned power plant, Popov grudgingly brings Charlie and Kestler into the game. While special forces foil that theft, another mafia crew hijacks a government train with enough plutonium to make over 40 good-sized bombs. As high Kremlin officials scramble to protect themselves and gain credit for recovery of the few lost canisters that turn up in Moscow, Charlie proceeds on the theory that the successful heist was an inside job. His cost- conscious masters in London reluctantly permit him to mount a sting operation in which Charlie, posing as a no-questions-asked arms dealer, brokers a sale of the purloined plutonium to front-men for Iraq on behalf of a Moscow mob racked by internal strife. His suspicions confirmed, Charlie stays calm, cool, and collected while all about him (including the hapless Kestler) are losing their heads or their lives during a climactic shoot-out in an East German warehouse. Permanently assigned to Moscow in the wake of a gratifying triumph, Charlie looks forward to renewing acquaintance with Natalia and Sasha. A first-rate addition to a deservedly popular series, one whose chilling plot is no more bizarre than contemporary headlines.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-14565-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
At about 500 pages, this one is fat, fast, and fun. Clancy's spirit lives on.
The latest high-energy entry in the Gray Man series (Back Blast, 2016, etc.).
Courtland Gentry, also known as the Gray Man, is everything you’d want in a fictional professional killer. The CIA agent–turned-freelancer is still on America’s side, he’s deadly against superior odds, and he trots out a conscience now and then. The CIA sends Gentry to Hong Kong for an assignment that is "possibly the most important of his life," but he's soon kidnapped. Identifying himself to his captors as “just a hired hit man looking for work,” he isn’t in town a full day before he kills two Chinese intelligence operatives. Then he learns his true mission, finding a Chinese defector for the CIA. Gentry isn’t sure whether he’s rescuing or kidnapping Fan Jiang, but it doesn’t matter. Fan is an information technology specialist from Mainland China who wants to go to Taiwan. The CIA wants Fan because he knows “the Chinese secure networks inside and out,” Chinese intelligence wants him back for the same reason, and even Vietnamese soldiers and gangsters are in on the hunt. And there is Zoya Zakharova, the beautiful (of course) Russian foreign intelligence agent assigned to bring Fan Jiang to Russia. She’s Gentry’s one adversary who is his equal. The action is fast and complicated with bodies galore—all for a good cause, of course—and one literal cliffhanger. Author Greaney co-wrote several Tom Clancy novels, and this thriller is tailor-made for Clancy’s fans. The Gray Man’s character is several shades darker than Jack Ryan’s, though he lacks Ryan’s depth. But Gentry always gets the job done for the US of A, and he entertains while doing it. Whether he kills or beds Zakharova, readers will have to find out.
At about 500 pages, this one is fat, fast, and fun. Clancy's spirit lives on.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-425-28285-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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