Meticulous plotting, literate prose and mordant wit make this a thriller for connoisseurs of the genre.
Nuanced, devilishly intricate thriller sends an enigmatic hero to China and far-flung ports to scope out agents, double agents and enticing women.
That a semi-colon (“That archaic punctuation mark…”) turns up here as a clue signals the level of subtlety that characterizes the plot of this latest from thriller and CIA veteran McCarry. Early on comes a harrowing action scene on the Yangtze, but otherwise, quiet and only occasionally violent moments drive the plot. In a tale in which characters are seldom what they seem, it’s significant that the protagonist and narrator (hereafter “Spy”) is never named. Known only to his handler, but not even to the U.S. intelligence agency he works for (also never named but located near Langley, VA., if you need a hint), Spy is a former football jock, a former fighter in Afghanistan and a man who may or may not care about his survival. He’s also intensely hirsute, which prompts Mei, a woman with whom he’s besotted, to call him “the chimpanzee.” But when six thugs abduct Spy, tossing him to the rats in the Yangtze, a contact tells him to get out of China. Back in the States, and desperately missing Mei, he checks in with his handler, Burbank, who makes visitors feel insecure and, literally, unsteady by seating them in a chair with sawed off front legs. Burbank wants Spy to find out what he can about a Chinese conglomerate’s ties to the Goanbu, the Chinese Intelligence Agency. Spy goes to work for the conglomerate. He’s soon jumping continents, gathering data. Before long, he finds himself in mortal danger, shadowed, in chilling scenes, on planes, in restaurants and on city streets. The biggest twist of all comes, well-timed, in the narrative’s final chapters, when McCarry’s largely cerebral puzzle reaches a breathless, emotionally resonant denouement.
Meticulous plotting, literate prose and mordant wit make this a thriller for connoisseurs of the genre.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2127-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
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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