Despite the flaws, well worth reading—Fesperman’s empathy for his protagonists, struggling to do the right thing, is...
Middle East intrigue swirls around an aid worker forced into a clandestine post-retirement mission—more classy suspense from Fesperman (The Prisoner of Guantánamo, 2006, etc.).
Freeman Lockhart and his wife Mila have paid their dues. The two UN aid workers (he’s American, she’s Bosnian Serb) met during the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, then moved on to equally stressful assignments in Rwanda and Tanzania. Now they’re retiring to their new home on a Greek island, but their first night is interrupted by three spooks (Freeman assumes they’re CIA). They take Freeman to a nearby empty villa. They want him to go to Amman, Jordan, to check out a former colleague, Omar al-Baroody, a Palestinian. Omar has his own operation now, raising money for a hospital. But is it a front? Freeman’s role will be to follow the money trail. He agrees in an effort to protect his wife: In Tanzania, Mila inadvertently caused a bloodbath, and Freeman wants desperately to protect her from this knowledge, but unless he plays ball, the spooks will enlighten her. In Amman he finds a welcoming Omar (Freeman will be his director of programs) but bitter rivalries among his cohorts. Fesperman, who has traveled widely, provides details with an insider’s mastery: The gritty Bakaa refugee camp, a run-in with Jordan’s own spy outfit and hairy side trips to Athens and Jerusalem are all nailed to perfection. Unfortunately, there is a parallel, much less convincing, story line involving a Palestinian-American married couple in suburban Washington. Their daughter has died, a victim of post-9/11 Arab profiling, and the father, a top surgeon, is plotting a spectacular revenge. Omar and Freeman’s handlers recede into the background as the surgeon’s wife, Aliyah, arrives in Amman, pursuing her own agenda. To add to the confusion, bombs are detonated by an unidentified group at three Amman hotels, killing scores. The hokey climax has Freeman confronting the surgeon in Washington.
Despite the flaws, well worth reading—Fesperman’s empathy for his protagonists, struggling to do the right thing, is impressive.Pub Date: March 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4467-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the...
Fired Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne bursts onto the scene of his unwilling collaborator and amanuensis, screenwriter/novelist Anthony, who seems to share all Horowitz’s (Forever and a Day, 2018, etc.) credentials, to tell him that the game’s afoot again.
The victim whose death requires Hawthorne’s attention this time is divorce attorney Richard Pryce, bashed to death in the comfort of his home with a wine bottle. The pricey vintage was a gift from Pryce’s client, well-to-do property developer Adrian Lockwood, on the occasion of his divorce from noted author Akira Anno, who reportedly celebrated in a restaurant only a few days ago by pouring a glass of wine over the head of her husband’s lawyer. Clearly she’s too good a suspect to be true, and she’s soon dislodged from the top spot by the news that Gregory Taylor, who’d long ago survived a cave-exploring accident together with Pryce that left their schoolmate Charles Richardson dead, has been struck and killed by a train at King’s Cross Station. What’s the significance of the number “182” painted on the crime scene’s wall and of the words (“What are you doing here? It’s a bit late”) with which Pryce greeted his murderer? The frustrated narrator (The Word Is Murder, 2018) can barely muster the energy to reflect on these clues because he’s so preoccupied with fending off the rudeness of Hawthorne, who pulls a long face if his sidekick says boo to the suspects they interview, and the more-than-rudeness of the Met’s DI Cara Grunshaw, who threatens Hawthorne with grievous bodily harm if he doesn’t pass on every scrap of intelligence he digs up. Readers are warned that the narrator’s fondest hope—“I like to be in control of my books”—will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many.
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the field has anywhere near this much ingenuity to burn.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267683-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Readers looking for someone, anyone, to root for won’t find it among these well-to-do suburbanites behaving badly.
After a terrible car accident, a woman is left without memory of the events, but a dead body at the scene speaks of something sinister.
When Karen Krupp crashes her car into a pole after fleeing an abandoned restaurant in a rough part of town in upstate New York, she’s left with a bad concussion and no memory of what happened before her accident. Her husband, Tom, doesn’t know what to think since she went out without her purse and ID and didn't leave him a note as she usually does, and those are only the first in a string of out-of-character actions for Karen. The shocks keep coming when a dead man is found in the derelict restaurant, shot to death, a pair of distinctive pink rubber gloves left at the scene. Tom is convinced Karen isn’t a murderer, but as evidence piles up, he starts to doubt that he ever really knew his wife at all. Karen won’t find comfort in her “friend” Brigid Cruikshank, who lives across the street. Poor Brigid hates her marriage to boring Bob, and all she can think about is the hanky-panky she and Tom were up to before he married Karen. Bob is inadequate, but Tom is her dream hubby, and as cracks form in Tom and Karen’s marriage, delusional Brigid only sees opportunity. Detectives Rasbach and Jennings smell something fishy and are convinced Karen is hiding something, and as they dig into her past, explosive secrets come to light. Tom is hapless and self-pitying, allowing himself to be manipulated at every turn, and Brigid, at times unintentionally funny, is the quintessential soap-opera villainess—she delights in spying on Tom and Karen through her window while knitting and nursing fantasies about Tom. Readers will guess the obligatory final twist quickly, and Lapena's (The Couple Next Door, 2016, etc.) attempts at creating any sort of suspense are crushed under the weight of predictability.
Readers looking for someone, anyone, to root for won’t find it among these well-to-do suburbanites behaving badly.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2112-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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