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
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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