The sharply drawn scenery, fascinating setting and a couple of exceptionally interesting central characters compensate for a...
Inter-agency rivalries, Cuban-American politics and prisoners of the War on Terror combine to rattle—quite sharply—the life of an FBI agent in Guantánamo, Cuba.
Baltimore Sun reporter Fesperman (The Warlord’s Son, 2004, etc.) continues his intelligent novelist’s tour of places you’d be terrified to visit (war-ravaged Yugoslavia, the Paki-Afghan border), alighting this time in Guantánamo Bay (“Gitmo”), that American thorn in Fidel’s side, where the U.S. has been parking thousands of young men who may or may not be terrorists. Former Marine and current FBI agent Revere Falk is there because a stint in Yemen has polished his already good Arabic, making him an exceptionally valuable interrogator. His grilling of Adnan, a very young, very distressed Yemeni, is interrupted, however, when the body of an American sergeant washes up on the wrong side of the fence dividing Gitmo from Castro’s Cuba, and Falk is assigned to clear up the case. The soldier, a reservist from Michigan, was a banker who had been getting worried letters from home about some odd dealings with shadowy Cayman Island banks. Falk quickly finds himself crowded out of both the drowning investigation and the interrogation of Adnan when higher-ups, including Falk’s own mentor, arrive from several spooky Washington departments. And, to compound the problems, Falk, after years of silence, has been contacted by the Cubans who blackmailed him into spying for them years ago, when he was a young Marine looking for a taste of Latin love. The intense interest in the Yemeni prisoner and the drowned soldier are related, but the relationship is largely invisible to an increasingly baffled Falk, who realizes that both he and the attractive Army captain he has been dating are both subjects of equally malign interest on the part of island spies.
The sharply drawn scenery, fascinating setting and a couple of exceptionally interesting central characters compensate for a plot that threatens occasionally to drown in detail.Pub Date: July 11, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-4466-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
The perfect gift for well-read mystery mavens who complain that they don’t write them like they used to.
A ghoulish killer brings a Boston bookseller’s list of perfect fictional murders to life—that is, to repeated, emphatic death.
The Red House Mystery, Malice Aforethought, The A.B.C. Murders, Double Indemnity, Strangers on a Train, The Drowner, Deathtrap, The Secret History: They may not be the best mysteries, reflects Malcolm Kershaw, but they feature the most undetectable murders, as he wrote on a little-read blog post when he was first hired at Old Devils Bookstore. Now that he owns the store with mostly silent partner Brian Murray, a semifamous mystery writer, that post has come back to haunt him. FBI agent Gwen Mulvey has observed at least three unsolved murders, maybe more, that seem to take their cues from the stories on Mal’s list. What does he think about possible links among them? she wonders. The most interesting thing he thinks is something he’s not going to share with her: He’s hiding a secret that would tie him even more closely to that list than she imagines. And while Mal is fretting about what he can do to help stop the violence without tipping his own hand, the killer, clearly untrammeled by any such scruples, continues down the list of fictional blueprints for perfect murders. Swanson (Before She Knew Him, 2019, etc.) jumps the shark early from genre thrills to metafictional puzzles, but despite a triple helping of cleverness that might seem like a fatal overdose, the pleasures of following, and trying to anticipate, a narrator who’s constantly second- and third-guessing himself and everyone around him are authentic and intense. If the final revelations are anticlimactic, that’s only because you wish the mounting complications, like a magician’s showiest routine, could go on forever.
The perfect gift for well-read mystery mavens who complain that they don’t write them like they used to.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-283820-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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