An uneven espionage tale.
In this World War II–set debut novel, a Romanian woman becomes an Allied spy but often finds herself just a pawn in a man’s world.
In 1939, Frans VonBrutal, a sadistic Nazi SS officer, motorcycles from Berlin toward Sofia, Bulgaria, looking for information (hopefully to be extracted with torture) and people to exploit. In Romania, he meets a beautiful young waitress named Gilda, who, despite being intelligent, is still attractive to men. Although Gilda is no friend to the SS, telling VonBrutal directly that he’s “a fucking Nazi asshole,” “a Nazi scumbag,” and a “putrid Nazi,” he decides not just to force sex upon her, but to employ her as a spy as well. This he manages despite her initial dislike: “When he lay on top of her, she welled up such a warmth of euphoria.” James Benson, an American spy with demigodlike charisma, meets and beds Gilda, now a nightclub dancer in Sofia. VonBrutal orders her to obtain James’ briefcase, but she falls abjectly in love with the American despite knowing she means nothing to him. After shooting VonBrutal and escaping, Gilda is told by Hans, a Hungarian recruiter, that she’ll travel to Central America to spy: “I am sure you will be just fine. After all, you have a perfect ass. Good luck.” Working as an entertainer, Gilda continues spying for her new handler, Stephon, a closeted homosexual in love with James, and attends Army Intelligence School. In Uruguay, VonBrutal shows up, threatening Gilda, who again shoots him. After the war, Gilda waitresses, then becomes a Pan Am stewardess, a cover for her covert activities, which now include assassination. In Cairo, she has a third bloody confrontation with the hard-to-kill VonBrutal. Used, abused, set up, and abandoned, Gilda nevertheless hangs on to hope. In her ambitious novel, O’Hara provides engrossing, well-researched details of early espionage organizations. But she never seems sure about what kind of book she’s writing: Nazi-themed murder porn? Steamy spy thriller? Romance for the ages? Political outcry on behalf of women’s dignity? All of these elements are in place, but they clash roughly and often unconvincingly, as when James’ sordid relationship with Gilda is characterized by the grand phrase “the two were to be separated between oceans, war, and time itself.” Rather than developing her themes, the author repeats them, often almost verbatim. “Sex and violence go hand in hand,” thinks VonBrutal’s wife; six pages later, “Sex and violence went hand in hand,” thinks VonBrutal. O’Hara’s lack of subtlety makes the work’s pronouncements heavy-handed. As long as “women knew their place, all would be well in the world,” muses James late in a narrative that has made many similar reflections. The book feels naïve, with odd stock-photo illustrations, unnecessary footnotes (for Jägermeister liqueur, for example), unlikely dialogue, and sentences that land with a thud (“Feeling used and discarded was an upsetting emotion”).
An uneven espionage tale.Pub Date: May 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5467-9598-8
Page Count: 126
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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