A suspenseful tale brimming with intriguing concepts.
A CIA operative–turned-monk threatens a covert organization that advocates science over religion in Jambor’s (Wildfire in the Desert, 2015) thriller.
The reason that Deep Water Ventures geologist Charles DeVibo is prevented from publishing his academic paper on renewable oil isn’t scientific but political—it might make oil companies lose revenue. This grim revelation sets Charles on an entirely new path. After a decade in the CIA, he joins a monastery to pursue his quest to find “Beauty, Goodness, and Truth” in the world. Years later, inspired by the Dom’s dream of a man emerging from the sea into a desert, he returns to his Arizona homeland to teach others what he’s learned. His arrival in the United States catches the attention of worldwide group EMR, whose Latin name references mankind’s progress through science. At the same time, EMR’s education analyst, Sibyl Bough, is concerned about a famous Tucson art teacher named Chiara Maye Gunnarson, who teaches that art speaks to the soul. EMR asserts that souls don’t exist, so Bough tries shutting the teacher down via the local school board. When that doesn’t work, EMR sends operatives after her and her former drug-mule boyfriend, Rodrigo Cruz. Weapons-trained Charles lends them a helping hand, which makes him EMR’s immediate target. Although most of the action comes later in the novel, the villains prove to be refreshing throughout. They’re largely ambiguous, preferring to use Latin monikers (such as “Primus”) instead of real names and physical violence as a last resort. Charles’ life quest is noble but vague, as it’s impossible to determine if he’s making any headway. Nevertheless, he’s consistently heroic and willing to sacrifice his mission to help a stranger. The overall narrative is generally abstract (alluding to God as “Source of Existence,” for example), but it’s also poetic: Charles in the remote desert, for example, “could feel in his nothingness the presence of the Absolute that created such vastness.”
A suspenseful tale brimming with intriguing concepts.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978264-0-1
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Pinifolius Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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