A revelatory thriller with edge-of-your-seat, end-of-the-world suspense.
Two intelligence officers—one American, the other Soviet—must work together to stave off a nuclear apocalypse.
Based on the undertold true story of the severest Cold War superpower standoff since the Cuban missile crisis, this thriller builds inexorably to its potentially calamitous conclusion. The year is 1983. The Soviet Union shoots down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, killing 269 civilians. The already strained tensions between America and the Soviet Union (which President Ronald Reagan calls an “evil empire”) escalate against a backdrop of mutual military maneuvers that culminate in a joint American-British nuclear war exercise with the participation of Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. “To our leaders,” this exercise “will look like the real thing,” Soviet intelligence officer Col. Ivan Levchenko confides to Capt. Kevin Cattani, his young American counterpart. Cattani counters with United States surveillance photographs of unprecedented Soviet “nuclear weapons activity throughout East Germany and Poland.” It all comes to a head on Sept. 26, when the Soviets’ early warning system picks up what appears to be a ballistic missile launch from the U.S. The doomsday clock is ticking as Cattani and Levchenko must work behind the scenes to defuse the situation. Why this tense incident has not been adapted for the screen is a puzzler. It’s a natural: part Fail Safe and part The Hunt for Red October. It’s all too timely as well, recalling a dangerous time when the world’s mightiest powers were not even on speaking terms. Morra, a former U.S. intelligence officer involved in the events on which the gripping book is based, writes with authority. He alternates perspectives between Cattani and Levchenko. Though they are different in age and ethnicity, their voices are perhaps too similar, an element that can be developed in future volumes (“Something tells me that we will meet again, Captain,” Levchenko teases at the story’s end). Early nonevents (a romance that quickly fizzles and hardly seems the bother) stall the narrative, but patient readers will be rewarded.
A revelatory thriller with edge-of-your-seat, end-of-the-world suspense.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64663-564-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.
What happened to Billy Barringer?
Thirty years after the disappearance of his best friend, Ethan Marsh is back in his childhood home on Hemlock Circle. His mom and dad have just moved to Florida, and they asked Ethan to look after the place until they can sell it, but all three of them know that he needs a place to stay while he tries to get his life back on track. Given that the trauma associated with Billy’s vanishing has turned into a lasting obsession for Ethan—one that disrupts his sleep and casts a pall on his marriage—it seems unlikely that the community he went to boarding school to escape will be much of a refuge, but…sure? As it happens, the babysitter he crushed on as a kid has also come home to take care of her father. Another childhood friend is raising his own family in the house where he grew up. And a one-time bully is now a detective. All of these people were involved in the events leading up to Billy’s disappearance, and they’re all together again when new information about the case surfaces. Sager is a gimmicky author; this isn’t a slam. Horror is a gimmicky genre and, although Sager doesn’t write horror, exactly, his use of horror tropes is a distinctive element of his novels. And fans may well be ready to accept this band of sleuths or ghost hunters or potential suspects working together to solve a 30-year-old mystery. They may, however, be less forgiving of the red herrings and a complicated resolution that raises more questions than it answers. The real sin here, though, is that this book is intensely boring. Ethan Marsh might be a sympathetic character, but he’s not an interesting character, and the narrative pace is punishingly slow.
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472378
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
