A fast-paced, hemisphere-spanning debut thriller about the downside of starting a new life.
At a conference, Dr. Stephanie Parrish eulogizes her late husband, Jordan Parrish, a Harvard scientist and founder of medical technology company Genometry, who had “dreamed of a world without disease.” Stephanie was told that her husband had been having an affair and that he and his girlfriend died in an accident. She accepts that he’s gone, “dead and buried, mourned after a fashion.” But there was no affair; worried about his finances and his shaky marriage, Jordan had contacted Exit Strategy, which helps people disappear and start new lives for a fee. Meanwhile, a huge insurance payoff ensures that Stephanie and Genometry are financially much better off with his death. The folks at Exit Strategy take their mission seriously—they will kill Jordan and his family if he contacts anyone he knows. But Jordan doesn’t want this situation (he must not have read the fine print), so he desperately looks for a way out as he’s assigned the job of teaching English in Japan. Exit Strategy inserts a device they call “The Angel” into his hand to track his every movement, and when he carelessly “likes” a photo of Stephanie on Instagram, he fears his family will be killed. His escape attempt takes him to the Middle East and to the Chunnel, where he must fight his way to England. Meanwhile, Stephanie learns Jordan is alive, and she wants him back. Lots of blood flows, as does semen in a weird sex scene. Later, a needless oral-sex encounter is surprising given the participants. And there’s an especially grisly and gratuitous cat murder. It’s clear why Exit Strategy wants to maintain client confidentiality, but these dudes must have murder in their business plan. They won’t last long if they have to go to such trouble for every straying client. But the writing is generally good, with plenty of tension and over-the-top action as the protagonists struggle against heavy odds to reunite.
An enjoyable read but hardly the stuff of legend.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-488-09538-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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. 6, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE
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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. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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