This brisk, tense page-turner will mesmerize fans of international mysteries.
A private plane takes off from London with two passengers aboard only to crash into the icy, blank mountains of the Alps, setting off an investigation that will expose corruption in the most elite financial institutions.
One victim, Matthew Werner, was an international banker who had moved to Geneva with his wife, Annabel, hoping to make quick money. His death stuns Annabel, of course, who fears that Matthew may have been having an affair with the second passenger, Fatima Amir, a gorgeous hedge fund investor with ties to the corrupt Syrian regime. Matthew's role as Amir's personal banker raises further questions about whether his employer, Swiss United Bank, has taken on criminal clients. Yet Annabel begins to doubt the police’s explanation of the crash and begins looking for answers herself. A late-night visit from Zoe, Matthew’s administrative assistant, further fuels her suspicions. Was Matthew complicit? Or was he preparing to blow the whistle? Meanwhile, investigative journalist Marina Tourneau, on vacation in Paris with her fiance, Grant Ellis—a well-connected investment banker whose father is preparing to run for president of the United States—receives a call from her boss, Duncan, who needs her to smuggle home a USB with encrypted data that might indeed reveal the financial secrets of the posh banking world, including those of Swiss United. When Duncan turns up dead, Marina steps up to investigate. Alger (This Was Not the Plan, 2016) has crafted a sharp, compelling thriller. Annabel's and Marina’s investigations stretch from Geneva to New York to London to the Cayman Islands, from mysterious millionaires to morally questionable CEOs. While Annabel uncovers Swiss United’s corporate secrets, Marina, with the help of fellow journalists, stealthily searches the smuggled data, piecing together money laundering schemes and shady coverups. As the women's lines of detection converge, the villains’ hackles rise. Shadowy figures in dark cars stalk Marina, burglars trash Annabel’s apartment, and no one is safe.
This brisk, tense page-turner will mesmerize fans of international mysteries.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1845-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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