Even with a plot hole or two, a tacked-on narrative thread about a corporate treasure-hunting enterprise and a believability...
Cussler and company (The Kingdom, 2011, etc.) send treasure hunters extraordinaire, Sam and Remi Fargo, onto the windy steppes of the ancient Hun empire searching for the tomb of the Scourge of God.
The Fargos are volunteering temporarily as excavators at a Paleo-Indian village site under shallow water off Grand Isle, La. The dive’s interrupted by a hasty call from famed German archaeologist, Albrecht Fischer. Fischer believes he’s unearthed a major find near Szeged, Hungary. The Fargos head off to Europe to help. Then, Fischer is kidnapped and taken to Szeged, only to be rescued by a Fargo-led amateur commando raid on a pharmaceutical complex owned by Arpad Bakor, a Hungarian who claims Attila as an ancestor. Bakor believes Fischer’s find may be the location of Attila’s legendary lost tomb. And so it goes, Sam and Remi, assisted by character-actor players who always appear at the right time, follow a series of Attila-supplied scavenger-hunt clues to the location of his triple-coffin burial site. The dialogue is sophisticated rom-com snappy, and there’s much mention of the right vintages and exotic gourmet dining and five-star hotels. Best of all are dozens of Wow! historical factoids about Attila and concurrent history. The settings are exotic: a vineyard south of Budapest; the confluence of the Po and Mincio rivers in Italy, the point where Attila turned away from Rome; then Châlons-en-Champagne, the furthermost western point of the Hun’s dominion; Transylvania; Kazakhstan, and finally, Rome’s Catacombs of Domitillia. There the story should end, but coming free with all the interesting Hun history is a multi-chapter shootout involving Hungarian, French and Russian bad guys, each of whom wanted a share of the tomb but will settle for revenge.
Even with a plot hole or two, a tacked-on narrative thread about a corporate treasure-hunting enterprise and a believability buy in—the Fargo’s bottomless money bucket—Cussler fans can expect more than a few hours of page-turning action.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15926-8
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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