An enjoyable read but hardly the stuff of legend.
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 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
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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