A tightly structured war novel, written with intelligence and verve.
Summers (The Shain Family at Shakertown, 1808-1922, etc.) offers a World War II thriller about espionage and betrayal overseas.
Randy Emerson studied archaeology at Harvard University, and then spent some postgraduation years living in French North Africa, becoming fluent in both French and Arabic. The suave, handsome man also created a vast network of friends and professional contacts—the perfect cover for a spy, which is exactly why the U.S. War Department approaches him in July 1941. He’s sent off for training in several countries and then dispatched to Casablanca, Morocco, tasked with hunting down traitors and enemy spies there. He’s told to assimilate as seamlessly as possible into the local culture, cultivate sources of information, and, of course, trust no one. Summers describes the setting as “an open city in North Africa where spies, current and ex-military, gun runners, pimps and scoundrels and all manner of law-breakers gathered to feast off the excess of this new world war.” Emerson is also given extraordinary autonomy in deciding how to handle problems, such as moles, as they arise. He answers to Robert Murphy, the head of a group known as the “Twelve Apostles,” and quickly finds a teammate in Mungo Craig, a native German speaker who grew up in French Québec. The two quickly establish home bases where they can clandestinely meet, send radio transmissions, and begin their hunts. Summers is a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction, and this is the 13th volume of his Lynch’s Corner Series. Summers’ experience shows in the polished prose as well as in the rigorous research evident on every page; his knowledge of North African culture, as well as the history of the period, is formidable. Also, the story provides something of a concise tutorial on the beginnings of the Office of Strategic Services, the less bureaucratic precursor to the CIA. There’s no scarcity of sharply conveyed intrigue, but the dialogue has the feel of 1940s film noir, which sometimes makes it seem like an homage and other times like a parody. Still, there’s more than enough action here to satisfy fans of historical thrillers, and plenty of edification to boot.
A tightly structured war novel, written with intelligence and verve.Pub Date: June 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5329-3935-8
Page Count: 388
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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