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
Definitely not for the squeamish—or skeptical.
Whether it’s 1893 or 2009, the town of Abandon, Colo., is a very nasty place to be.
When a novel opens with a little girl blowing away a mule skinner with a revolver, readers can safely expect more dirty work to come. And they get it in spades from Crouch (Locked Doors, 2005, etc.), who sets up two alternating, equally unsavory plotlines. In 2009, historian Lawrence Kendall takes along his journalist daughter Abigail Foster on an expedition to the Colorado ghost town whose inhabitants all vanished without a trace in December 1893. In those days, we see in the second narrative, Abandon is in decline, the nearby mine tapped out, though there are still plenty of prostitutes and gunslingers around—and local bigwig Bart Packer has 91 gold bars he found next to a headless Spanish skeleton stashed away in his fancy house. That conquistador gold will cause no end of trouble, as 19th-century desperados kill Packer and hide the gold in the mine, and 21st-century Iraq veterans brutalize Lawrence’s party in an effort to make the historian tell them where the gold is located. People are shot at point-blank range, knives are brandished, gruesome wounds inflicted, and it all gets fairly ridiculous after a while. One or two gotchas will make you jump: the bad guy you thought was dead who comes from behind with a dagger; the sheriff you thought would help who turns out to be one of Them. When a crazy preacher locking the entire Abandon population in the mine to starve is followed by the story of the woman whose husband cut out her tongue with a razor, or a post-traumatic, stressed-out Iraq veteran gets shot as he threatens for the umpteenth time to carve up Abigail in unspeakable ways, readers are likely to stop flinching and start laughing.
Definitely not for the squeamish—or skeptical.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53740-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
This disturbing tour behind the scenes of a stolen childhood exposes cringe-inducing truths—and leads to a shocking...
In the murder of a teenage beauty queen, many suspects vie for the crown.
Who would want to kill a 13-year-old girl like Jenny Kennedy? The most likely suspect is Benjy Lincoln, a developmentally disabled man who had an inappropriate crush on Jenny and followed her from pageant to pageant. But Jenny’s half sister, Virginia, doesn’t believe he’s guilty. So she teams up with Detective Brandon Colsen to interview Benjy and other people Jenny knew. As Virginia digs up her sister’s sordid history, the last days of Jenny’s life unfold in alternating chapters. It’s unclear who’s guilty, but no one in town is innocent. By the time Jenny was found dead, she had already quit her beauty pageants and was planning to run away with JP, a boy from school. Jenny’s guidance counselor, Hunter Willoughby, ignored the warning signs. So did her father, who keeps a separate residence in New York. Her mother coped with the news by drinking herself into a stupor. At school, Jenny faced backlash from Christine Castleton and Mallory Murphy, the popular girls she rejected. And Benjy, of course, was heartbroken when she quit. But Virginia has a secret too. When she was in high school, she had an affair with a teacher, Mark Renkin, and has never recovered. Every week, she drinks until she blacks out, making her wonder where she was and what she was doing on the night Jenny was murdered.
This disturbing tour behind the scenes of a stolen childhood exposes cringe-inducing truths—and leads to a shocking conclusion.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4510-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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