by Charles McCarry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 3, 2015
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
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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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