Ex-spooks play a murderous game in Freemantle’s suspenseful latest (Dead End, 2005, etc.).
His CIA colleagues gave Jack Mason a high rating. He was a spook’s spook—smart, intuitive, relentless. Too bad he worked for the wrong side. For a long time, he was, as they say, embedded, a double agent working with Colonel Dimitri Sobell of the KGB. Enter that most unexpected of intruders, Cupid. The colonel falls deeply in love—with Jack Mason’s disenchanted wife. Soon, Moscow will be calling Sobell home, and if he’s to remain with Ann, he has no choice but to defect. In addition, he brings Mason in from the cold the hard way, ratting him out to the CIA. Mason draws 20 years but gets it cut to 15, a period he devotes in large measure to imagining revenge fantasies. Meanwhile, Dimitri becomes Daniel Slater and, with Ann and their 14-year-old son, disappears into the Witness Protection Program. Now he operates a thriving industrial security business and Mrs. Slater an up-and-coming art gallery. Life is good—until word reaches them of Mason’s parole. Though shaken at first by the news, Slater recovers quickly, convinced that the Witness Protection camouflage is impenetrable, even by a spy as accomplished as Mason. Ann, however, panics. Even more than Slater, she appreciates Mason’s twisted cleverness, his obsessiveness, his capacity for hatred—all fed by 15 years of contemplating his betrayal. The payback he has so long envisioned is to be artful, meticulously designed and exquisitely slow: “Only after inflicting every conceivable hurt and loss would he finally kill Sobell.” And so it begins, the oh-so-deadly game of One Survivor.
Though the oeuvre now numbers in the 30s, this bleak, chilling entry demonstrates well that the veteran thrillermeister can still make a reader gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6446-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A middle-aged woman sidelined by a horrific accident finds even sharper pains waiting on the other side of her recuperation in this expert nightmare by Hardy, familiar to many readers as Megan Hart, author of All the Secrets We Keep (2017), etc.
Five months ago, while she was on her way to the hospital with an ailing gallbladder, Diana Sparrow’s car hit a deer on a rural Pennsylvania road. When she awoke, she was minus her gallbladder, two working collarbones (and therefore two functioning arms), and her memory. During a recovery that would’ve been impossible without the constant ministrations of Harriett Richmond, the mother-in-law who’s the real reason Diana married her husband, Jonathan, Diana’s discovered that Jonathan has been cheating on her with her childhood friend Valerie Delagatti. Divorce is out of the question: Diana’s grown used to the pampered lifestyle the prenup she’d signed would snatch away from her. Every day is filled with torments. She slips and falls in a pool of wine on her kitchen floor she’s sure she didn’t spill herself. At the emergency room, her credit card and debit card are declined. She feels that she hates oppressively solicitous Harriett but has no idea why. Her sessions with her psychiatrist fail to heal her rage at her adoptive mother, an addict who abandoned her then returned only to disappear again and die an ugly death. Even worse, her attempts to recover her lost memory lead to an excruciatingly paced series of revelations. Val says Diana asked her to seduce Jonathan. Diana realizes that Cole, a fellow student in her watercolor class, isn’t the stranger she’d thought he was. Where can this maze of deceptions possibly end?
One of those rare thrillers whose answers are even more scarifying than its mysteries.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64385-470-0
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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Now that Coben’s added politics to his heady brew, expect sex and religion to join the mix.
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Coben’s latest darkest-suburbs thriller sets a decidedly offbeat detective on the trail of a crime with overtones unmistakably redolent of once and future presidential elections.
Wilde is called Wilde because nobody’s known his real name from the moment a pair of hikers found him foraging for himself in Ramapo Mountain State Forest 24 years ago. Now over 40, he’s had experience as both a lost boy and a private investigator. That makes him an obvious person to help when his godson, Sweet Water High School student Matthew Crimstein, expresses concern to his grandmother, attorney Hester Crimstein, that his bullied classmate Naomi Pine has gone missing. Matthew doesn’t really want anyone to help. He doesn’t even want anyone to notice his agitation. But Hester, taking the time from her criminal defense of financial consultant Simon Greene (Run Away, 2019) to worm the details out of him, asks Wilde to lend a hand, and sure enough, Wilde, unearthing an unsavory backstory that links Naomi to bullying classmate Crash Maynard, whose TV producer father, Dash Maynard, is close friends with reality TV star–turned–presidential hopeful Rusty Eggers, finds Naomi hale and hearty. Everything’s hunky-dory for one week, and then she disappears again. And this time, so does Crash after a brief visit to Matthew in which he tearfully confesses his guilt about the bad stuff he did to Naomi. This second disappearance veers into more obviously criminal territory with the arrival of a ransom note that demands, not money, but the allegedly incriminating videotapes of Rusty Eggers that Dash and Delia Maynard have had squirreled away for 30 years. The tapes link Rusty to a forgotten and forgettable homicide and add a paranoid new ripped-from-the-headlines dimension to the author’s formidable range. Readers who can tune out all the subplots will find the kidnappers easy to spot, but Coben finds room for three climactic surprises, one of them a honey.
Now that Coben’s added politics to his heady brew, expect sex and religion to join the mix.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4814-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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