A grim examination of the effects of war on those who would give anything not to be waging it.
No one is sinless enough to cast the proverbial stone—but in this freighted, violence-punctuated novel by Danish journalist Jensen (We, the Drowned, 2011, etc.), the sins mount page by page.
Why are Westerners, including a detachment of Danish soldiers, in Afghanistan, especially so long after bin Laden has been done away with? Well, says a tough-as-nails commander named Schrøder, “We believe in free will, don’t we? That’s why you’re here. That’s why I’m here. And that’s why the Americans are here. To force the Afghans to recognize the existence of free will.” That observation comes toward the end of a long, bloody tale that would do Søren Kierkegaard proud—if, that is, Kierkegaard had been a novelist. Jensen depicts a group of one-foot-in-the-grave fighters, men and women who learn in the decidedly situational arena of Afghanistan that things are never as they seem: The American mercenaries whom they fight alongside have loyalty only to their wallets, a predilection that soon enough infects members of the Danish contingent, who are quick to abandon their philosophical interests in the quest for dollars. “Are you working for the Taliban?” a senior officer asks Schrøder, who answers, “Good question….I work for myself. I take advantage of the chances I get. Today’s friends are tomorrow’s enemies.” Indeed, about the only people to be trusted in Jensen’s twist-full story are the Taliban fighters arrayed against the Americans, Danes, and Brits who populate it: They, at least, have moral clarity and a sense of purpose, as opposed to Schrøder, who had worked in civilian life as a designer of video games in which “skinhead assassins" unleashed all sorts of mayhem—good training, as it happens, for the ugliness to come. Jensen is unflinching in describing that mayhem as it figures in the real world of his novel, from rape and torture to one particularly brutal scene in which flayed bodies line a road like so many victims on the road to Golgotha.
A grim examination of the effects of war on those who would give anything not to be waging it.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4439-4
Page Count: 588
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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