by Clive Cussler & Boyd Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017
Cussler and Morrison will always entertain when you're tired of binge-watching TV action shows.
Juan Cabrillo and the Oregon’s crew are imperiled by Filipino communist guerrillas armed with deadly aquatic drones in Cussler and long-time co-writer Morrison's (The Emperor's Revenge, 2016, etc.) latest spy-ship adventure.
Owned by the Corporation, which conducts missions for the CIA and is led by ex–CIA operative Langston Overholt IV, the Oregon looks like a derelict freighter but is powered by magnetohydrodynamic engines and carries exotic weaponry like Exocet missiles and a 120mm cannon. The ship is in the Pacific when Cabrillo's called to find a top-secret thumb drive sought by both the Ghost Dragon triad and the Chinese Ministry of State Security. That problem solved, Cabrillo and crew are told Salvador Locsin, the communist New People’s Army chief in the Philippines, has uncovered a lost Imperial Japanese WWII–era superdrug, Typhoon, developed from an exotic Philippine orchid. Typhoon is said to generate superhuman strength and provide "quick blood clotting and accelerated tissue regeneration,” sure to trigger chaos if it gets into the wrong hands. Cussler and Morrison’s superfast scene shifting via dozens of short chapters means tighten your seat belts, because the narrative never slows. Purloined art by Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Raphael, Gauguin, and Cezanne bankrolls the assorted communist enterprises. Locsin is also searching for the WWII sunken ship USS Pearsall, which was carrying barrels of Typhoon. Were Americans tied to the killer drug? Or was it another of the “obscene medical experiments” of the Imperial Army's nefarious Unit 731? Along the way, the Oregon is imperiled by Locsin's just-add-water drone, the "the size and shape of a Jet Ski" with a "hundred pounds of Semtex inside." A good portion of the book's first half is scene-setting, then Cabrillo and company pull out the M-4s and Glocks and start settling scores. Corregidor's abandoned WWII tunnels and isolated Philippine jungle islands provide the background, but there's zero character development and much macho, self-referential, and repartee-laden dialogue.
Cussler and Morrison will always entertain when you're tired of binge-watching TV action shows.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57557-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by J.A. Jance
by Catherine Coulter ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2019
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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