Good enough while it lasts, but richer characters would have made it last longer.
Classic noir themes of trust, motive, and tarnished ideals spin through this mordant, cerebral thriller about an agent on a two-tiered mission.
Veteran thriller author and former CIA op McCarry opens this latest with a cracking good setup. The narrator, an intelligence agent never named, bitterly recalls his father’s fate at the hands of Headquarters, an agency that clearly represents the CIA. To spite his bosses for thwarting his career, the father, acting independently, took in a Russian spy whose plea for amnesty may have been the genuine article or a ploy to infiltrate Headquarters, an uncertainty the father hoped would frustrate his superiors. Outraged by this dark prank, the men at Headquarters cut the father loose, stripping him of his benefits. In vivid, stinging scenes, the son recalls his father’s swift, tragic demise and vows revenge: he’ll pursue a mission that seemingly benefits, but really devastates, Headquarters. The narrator’s bilevel junket sends him to Buenos Aires, where he works with, and against, a group of revolutionaries with ties to Russia. He falls in love with one of them, Luz, a voluptuary who seems to have wandered into the plot from a 1960s Bond movie and/or a gig at the Playboy Mansion—she spends most of her time in bed pleasuring the narrator. This lack of development extends to other secondary characters, dogging the novel, especially in its midsection. Here, the narrator works through a cat’s cradle of agents and terrorists. Their uncertain, shifting, and negotiable actions lucidly illustrate the methods of spies at work, but as these characters are defined by little more than their intentions, their scenes become redundant. The narrator’s handlers, a nest of sly snakes, are somewhat more sharply developed. They send the narrator on a final errand that bookends the tale’s swift, exciting start and reaches a splendidly ironic resolution.
Good enough while it lasts, but richer characters would have made it last longer.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2410-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.
A lonely British schoolteacher falls for an American man incarcerated for the murder of a young woman. What could possibly go wrong?
Samantha, 31, is still reeling from a bad breakup when she discovers Framing the Truth: The Murder of Holly Michaels, an 18-year-old true-crime documentary about the killing of a young girl by then-18-year-old Dennis Danson, aka the suspected Red River Killer, who’s still on death row in Florida’s Altoona Prison. Sam writes to Dennis, and soon they’re declaring their love for each other. Sam flies to the U.S. to meet him, and although they’re separated by plexiglass, she knows that she’s found the love of her life. The chirpy Carrie, who co-produced and directed the first documentary, is Sam’s guide while she’s there, and Sam accompanies her while they film a new series about Dennis, A Boy from Red River. Sam and Dennis quickly marry when new evidence comes to light and Dennis is exonerated and released. Amid a whirlwind of talk shows, celebrity attention, and the new series premiere, married life isn’t quite what Sam had hoped for: intimacy is nonexistent, the already self-loathing Sam feels unloved and unwanted, and the appearance of Dennis’ clingy childhood friend Lindsay Durst sends Sam into a jealous fit. After Dennis’ father dies, they move into Dennis’ childhood home, and Sam begins to suspect he may be hiding something. After all, what actually happened to all those other missing girls? Refreshingly, Lloyd seems absolutely unconcerned with whether or not her characters are likable, and although a few British sayings ("round," “in hospital”) make their way into the dialogue of the American characters, her research into the aftereffects of long incarceration is obvious, and her portrait of an emotionally damaged woman feels spot-on.
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-95240-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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