Millennial politics in 2001, in a sumptuous sequel to McCarry's long-running series about secret agent Paul Christopher's family (Second Sight, 1991, etc.). McCarry wastes no time in establishing his electrifying premise: On the eve of President Bedford Forrest Lockwood's second inaugural, his defeated opponent, Franklin Mallory, announces, first to Lockwood and then to the world, that someone in Lockwood's campaign stole the election by manipulating computerized vote tallies in three key states. Will Lockwood resign in Mallory's favor? He will not, thank you, but instead prepares for the inevitable impeachment trial by allowing his chief of staff—Christopher's cousin Julian Hubbard—to nominate as his new Chief Justice (who will by law preside over the trial) the strenuously unaffiliated Archimedes Hammett—that staunch courtroom defender of terrorists and consumer of natural foods. But Hubbard and Hammett, members of the utopian and ultra-secret Shelley Society since their days at Yale, are playing a far deeper game than Lockwood realizes. What they plan, together with the other Shelleyans who've honeycombed the government, is nothing less than the collapse of the presidency and the dawn of a totalitarian new government. It's Seven Days in May all over again, of course, but this time with every thrust and counterthrust—except for a single puzzling assassination early on—planned strictly within the laws of the land. As the Shelleyans plot to show how the Constitution allows for the nation to be delivered legally into the hands of a far-left dictatorship, McCarry grooms Christopher's now-grown daughter Zarah for a crucial role as political mediator and assassination bait. Even discounting the baroque embellishments that keep threatening to derail the story—Ouija board revelations, excursions into Mani†te folkways, impassioned accounts of new technologies for embryo recovery, leisurely portraits of every citizen residing within the Beltway—McCarry plots with a grand extravagance that generates tremendous suspense and leaves you more shaken than ever once you've turned the last page.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41533-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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