Love, lust, money, treachery, death and violence, all in a nice tidy package.
Lawless Chinese capitalists attack lawless American capitalists in a smooth thriller that includes a little sex, the mob and a load of sewage.
Beautiful Jin Li, manager of a Manhattan office-cleaning firm, ducks death when she steps away for a pee on the beach while her Mexican cleaning crew, still smoking dope in their battered Toyota, drowns in a load of sewage dumped from a septic tank-cleaning truck through the car’s sunroof. It’s no industrial accident. The culprits were following orders on a job commissioned indirectly by an executive of Good Pharma, a pharmaceutical firm from whom Jin Li had been stealing information. The clues, pieced together from office wastebaskets, point to Jin Li’s brother Chen, a stupendously rich young Shanghai businessman with a greedy eye on Western markets. Jin Li goes into deep hiding and Chen flies over with some goons to find her, pressing into service Jin Li’s strong, silent, ex-boyfriend Ray Grant, using Ray’s dying father, a retired NYPD detective, as Ray’s pressure point. The senior Grant is on his way out of this world, eased by opiates, but he’s still got the stuff, pointing Ray in the right direction to find his terrified girlfriend. The route to Jin Li goes by way of the New York storm-sewer system, where Ray finds clues leading to the septic-cleaning firm, its evil hoodlum owner, the hoodlum’s dungeon room, the pharmaceutical firm and an extremely fierce and stupendously rich old investor who is seriously unhappy with Good Pharma’s sinking stock. Dancing in frantic fear on the sideline is the Good Pharma exec who started all the mischief and whose wife, a canny physician, has begun to discover her husband’s perfidy. Harrison (The Havana Room, 2004, etc.) keeps it all moving at a breakneck pace.
Love, lust, money, treachery, death and violence, all in a nice tidy package.Pub Date: April 10, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-29949-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.
This complex psychological thriller digs deep into the layers of trauma that linger long after a terrible crime.
This is the 17th novel by Unger (Under My Skin, 2018, etc.), and it revisits one of her frequent themes: the indelible impact of violence on the survivors of crimes. The survivor at its center is Rain Winter, who at age 12 was one of three friends who became the victims of a monster. At first glance, Rain seems to have overcome that nightmare. She’s happily married and reveling in motherhood, although she vacillates between the joy she finds in 1-year-old Lily and the tug of the job she left as a hard-charging radio news producer. That tug increases when she hears that a man whose murder trial she covered, a man who was acquitted of killing his pregnant wife, has been found dead—killed in just the same way his wife was. Rain was sure he was guilty, so she feels some dark satisfaction, and her investigative instincts (and maybe something else) are aroused when a dark web mole, tipster, and blogger tells her off the record that there have been other, very similar revenge murders, and they might be the work of the same person. That wakes her own worst memories: “There weren’t many people who remembered Rain’s ugly history. It was big news once, but it had faded in the bubbling morass of horrific crimes since then.” Its aftermath included the children’s attacker being released from prison—and murdered. Chapters describing Rain’s pursuit of the story of a possible vengeful serial killer are intercut with chapters narrated by a mysterious person from her past, one who is closer to her in the present than she knows. Unger skillfully peels back the layers of Rain’s emotional scar tissue to expose the truth of what happened in her childhood and the fear, rage, and guilt it left behind, with a series of shocking consequences.
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0872-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As the plot grows more complicated, it also sheds believability, leaving sex and witty banter to carry the day.
Brown (Mean Streak, 2014, etc.) ticks off the boxes that elevate her books to the bestseller lists in this sexy romantic thriller set in Texas.
Rock-jawed hero with a dark past: check. Strong-willed, beautiful woman who resists his charms: check. A Whitman’s Sampler of bad guys: check. And finally, a convoluted and not always plausible plot: check. In this latest outing, readers meet TV journalist Kerra Bailey, whose family was torn apart years ago by a hotel bombing that killed 197 people in Dallas. Just in time for the 25th anniversary, Kerra scores an interview with the notoriously private Maj. Trapper, who saved her life, among others, when he emerged from the blast to lead the survivors out of danger. There's an iconic, prizewinning photo of the major carrying a little girl from the wreckage, but the child has never been identified—until now, when Kerra goes public with the information that it was her. Just after they finish filming the interview in his home, the major is shot, and an injured Kerra escapes in the confusion. The major’s son, disgraced Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent John Trapper—a name M*A*S*H fans will appreciate—steps in, igniting a chain of events that leads to murder, intrigue, betrayal, and a series of dark revelations. As with most of Brown’s heroes and heroines, there’s palpable sexual tension between Trapper, whose taut rear occupies ample literary real estate, and Kerra, who when dealing with Trapper feels “like he’d lightly scratched her just below her bellybutton” when he’s not making her “pleasure points throb.” The complex plot plays out in a round of reveals that don’t always make a lot of sense, but that’s not why Brown’s fans read her books. They check in for the witty, pitch-perfect dialogue and fluid writing. A master of her genre, Brown knows how to please her most ardent readers but relies too often on the same basic formula from novel to novel.
As the plot grows more complicated, it also sheds believability, leaving sex and witty banter to carry the day.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-7210-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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