Deftly written, mordantly cynical send-up of a bed-hopping Kennedyesque scoundrel, charming in his own way, who thinks he’s JFK’s illegitimate child and so resolves to run for the Presidency. The ninth novel from McCarry is but a small step removed from his worldly-wise eight-volume Paul Christopher spy series (Shelley’s Heart, 1995, etc.). Through Dmitri, a former KGB colonel living in happy, post-Communist exile in America, we meet Jack Fitzgerald Adams, a cowardly, good-looking, sexually prodigious liar from Tannery Falls, Ohio. Recruited by the KGB while attending Columbia University during the era of the Vietnam War protests, Jack is eagerly led by Dmitri’s diabolically intelligent superior, a suavely satanic Åbermensch known as Peter, into the kinky clutches first of radical Marxist Greta FÅrst, who has torrid sex with him in public places, and then into those of brainy Harvard MBA (and secret fanatic Communist subversive) Morgan Weatherby, who has almost no sex in him at all. After Peter flashes Jack incriminating photos of his sexual exploits, Jack agrees to marry Morgan and practice law back in Ohio with his best friend, crippled Vietnam vet Danny Miller. But alas, unbeknownst to Danny, Jack had raped Danny’s wife, Cindy, while Danny was overseas. Unsure whether it was Danny or Jack who got her pregnant, Cindy had aborted the fetus and has hated Jack ever since. Though Morgan wrings the truth from her, this betrayal by Jack anticipates his ever larger and more audacious acts of fraud, carelessness, and sexual license as his KGB handlers (now working for the Chinese) craft him into a populist hero for an easily seduced electorate. Nasty Kennedy-Clinton parallels abound in a ribald, snickeringly ironic political fantasy. McCarry dedicates Lucky Bastard to the late Richard Condon, whose dizzy, over-the-top social satires it resembles. (Author tour)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44761-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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