A guy with “the soul of a bohemian caged by the mind of an auditor” finds more excitement on the job than he’d ever...
The cultural dynamic of Dubai provides the most compelling element in this international thriller.
A former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, award-winning crime novelist Fesperman (The Arms Maker of Berlin, 2009, etc.) finds intrigue in yet another exotic locale, though the one-dimensional characters offer no match for the ambiguities of the setting, a city steeped in tradition yet growing at an astounding pace that results in cultural whiplash. It is an “eerie insta-city…(where) everything between the desert and the deep blue sea was for sale, and all of it was either going fast or being paved over to make way for more.” Observes protagonist Sam Keller, a young auditor for a huge pharmaceutical company, “This was how the Emerald City must have looked after the Wizard flew off in his balloon, taking all the rules with him.” Sam’s work includes a lot of travel, though he is surprised when his superiors ask him to meet with an older, more reckless colleague in Dubai for what appears to be babysitting detail. Sam accompanies the colleague to a brothel, where a murder generates suspicion that Sam might be implicated. But the reader recognizes early on that characters in this novel are either good or bad and that Sam is one of the good guys, though it can be a challenge for him to distinguish the other good guys from the bad guys. He finds himself caught between two rival police officers and has to decide which one is more likely to help him and which is more interested in framing him. His home corporation that initially promised to help protect him inexplicably appears to be turning on him. He receives support from an obligatory love interest, who is plainly good, though her father fears that her increasingly Westernized values are bad. As the plot thickens, Sam finds himself “sought by the police, your employers, your embassy, and the criminal elite of two nations.”
A guy with “the soul of a bohemian caged by the mind of an auditor” finds more excitement on the job than he’d ever anticipated.Pub Date: July 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26838-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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