An intriguing, if occasionally awkward, cyberespionage thriller.
U.S. Army major Brad Stout must go undercover into the cyberdepths of eBay to foil a deadly radioactive threat in the first book of Salter’s eBay Detective series.
The Army’s leading experts in weapons of mass destruction are being taken out one by one in suburban Maryland, just miles from where they serve their country as critical researchers. Brad, a decorated veteran of the Bethesda-based Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, is hard at work piecing together a series of questionable purchases by anonymous eBay buyers. He devises a cunning online strategy, offering to sell radiobiological items on eBay, and soon, the prime suspect in the murders is in FBI custody. At home, he has a spinster sister, with whom he shares troubling memories of their abusive father, and a new fiancee, Mary Lou, who’s pregnant with twins. Brad’s ready to return to his normal life—until he receives an email from another anonymous buyer. Convinced that this new buyer is working with the first, Brad panics, believing that he, his fiancee and his sister could be the next casualties. He races to protect those he loves, while keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of a psychopath. Based on a true story, the engaging plot reaches back into World War II history and secret Nazi laboratories. Its prose and hackneyed dialogue don’t offer the same sense of excitement, however. For example, in the opening chapter, a villain fakes an injury, and when an innocent woman asks what she can do to help him, he replies, “You can die!”; in a later scene, when a character asks the same villain what he should do with some sensitive materials, he replies, “You can take them to your grave!” The novel’s structure is repetitive, as well, with Brad alternating between the government facility, his eBay basement and his girlfriend’s home. The bond shared between Brad and his sister feels genuine and lends them some depth, but Mary Lou is depicted as an overseasoned Cajun stereotype.
An intriguing, if occasionally awkward, cyberespionage thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1621474920
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent,...
Coauthors King and Straub, together again (The Talisman, 1984), take a Wisconsin Death Trip into parallel universes.
The Fisherman, who copycats long-dead serial killer Albert Fish, has been chopping up little kids in French Landing, Wisconsin, and sending letters to the children’s parents identical to those Fish sent parents 67 years ago—letters never made public, so how does The Fisherman do this? The local police chief asks for help from Jack Sawyer (hero of The Talisman), a Los Angeles homicide detective now in retirement. As a child, Jack flipped into the Territories, the parallel world in The Talisman, but has since forgotten his trip. What about the all-black Black House in the woods? Well, only Charles Burnside (Alzheimer’s) and Tinky Winky Judy Marshall (just plain crazy) know the Black House is the doorway to Abbalah, the entrance to hell—and Judy’s son Tyler is apparently the killer’s fourth victim. Jack’s new buddy, blind Henry Leyden, a radio deejay with four discrete identities no one knows are his, can’t talk Jack into taking the case. But when little Irma Freneau’s gnawed foot arrives in a shoebox on Jack’s welcome mat, Jack flips and lands in the Territories. The Territories confer a sacred magic and, in Jack’s case, absolute luck that lets him win his every bet or endeavor. Tyler, it happens, is telekinetic, and has been abducted by the Crimson King. All universes are held in place by the Dark Tower, the great interdimensional axle the Crimson King wants to destroy. Jack must save Tyler from the furnace-lands below Black House—and here the novel strives for depth, though interest dwindles.
Those not knowing King’s Dark Tower series or The Talisman will follow all this easily enough. Many admiring King’s recent, subtler work, though, may find these blood-spattered pages a step backward into dreamslash & gutspill.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50439-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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