The Cussler conglomerate holds the patent on the Don’t analyze, turn the page! manly action adventure.
Cussler (Piranha, 2015, etc.) charges co-author Morrison with chronicling another rollicking Juan Cabrillo adventure.
Disgruntled Ukrainian navy captain Sergey Golov has pirated Achilles, the private yacht of Russian mega-billionaire Maxim Antonovich. Golov's accomplice is his daughter, Ivana, a computer whiz. She’s also the infamous hacker ShadowFoe, which means she has the keyboard savvy to warp 30 billion euros into secret foreign accounts and then stall pursuit by uploading a virus to computers controlling the European electric power grid. Ivana’s virus is unbreakable. It’s based on math formulas theorized by 19th-century genius Alexei Polichev, whose papers were purloined during Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Daddy Golov will find and destroy Polichev’s notes while Ivana infects the network. First, she steals a few million from Credit Condamine. Bad choice. That’s the Oregon crew’s bank. Newbies get a précis on Cabrillo and his privatized CIA–like company and its floating headquarters, Oregon, a cutting-edge warship disguised as a tramp steamer. However, Achilles has been equipped with a railgun and a laser defense weapon by the same Vladivostok shipyard. Sea battles, anyone? Wait! Cabrillo must first foil the Saharan Islamic Caliphate’s nuclear ambitions. Then it’s nefarious deeds and heroic derring-do from the Monaco Grand Prix to Malta, Germany, Lithuania, Holland, and the Baltic. The exotic weapons–driven, more-threads-than-a-sweater narrative explodes with action, dead bodies hither and yon, with Cabrillo making enough skin-of-the-teeth escapes that he’ll need to visit his dentist. The cast is comprised of one-size-fits-all stalwart or malevolent characters, and the locations are anchored by spare descriptions of landmarks, but when there’s "only ten days to prevent the world from suffering a disastrous financial meltdown," the Oregon’s ready to rescue.
The Cussler conglomerate holds the patent on the Don’t analyze, turn the page! manly action adventure.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17596-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
