Pyne keeps expertly mixing up his pitches long after you’ve stopped expecting anything but blazing fastballs.
An unusually active risk management agent sent home to rest embarks on a tropical cruise that drops her into hotter waters than ever.
Everyone at Solomon Systems agrees that Aubrey Sentro needs a break after her dramatic rescue of kidnapped software exec Scott Chang, and they don’t even know about her recent diagnosis with persistent post-concussion syndrome, which affects her memory in dramatic and unpredictable ways. Forced to use some of her accumulated vacation days, Sentro books passage aboard the Jeddah, a working steamer that carries a few passengers. Though she can’t even remember most of their names from meal to meal, Sentro becomes unexpectedly close to outspoken Fontaine Fox just in time for heavily armed pirates to board the ship and terrorize passengers and crew alike. Despite their apparent amateurism, identical twins Pauly and Castor Zeme are no ordinary pirates: They’re acting on behalf of someone who’s after much more than the usual cash, credit cards, jewelry, and valuables. As Pyne keeps reminding you, however, Sentro is no ordinary victim either, and her reaction when the Jeddah is boarded sparks the first of many violent sequences so unforgettable that even she might end up remembering them. If only her adult children, Jeremy and Jennifer Troon, could be persuaded to stand down from involving themselves personally in the mercenaries’ ransom demand, her story would end much more quietly—but what would be the fun in that?
Pyne keeps expertly mixing up his pitches long after you’ve stopped expecting anything but blazing fastballs.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2502-7
Page Count: 366
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Lots of violent action with little payoff.
Jack Ryan Jr. is back to risk life and limb in saving a teenage girl from international killers while his father, U.S. President Jack Ryan Sr., figures out what to do with Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment facility, hidden in a mine.
Junior, head of the secret intelligence outfit The Campus, which was functionally wiped out in Tom Clancy Flash Point (2023), is heading across Texas to a rendezvous with his fiancee, Lisanne Robertson, a one-armed former Marine and cop. He’s waylaid by the aftermath of a multi-vehicle accident that he discovers resulted from a gun attack that left a driver hanging on for life, and now puts Jack in the crosshairs of the gunmen. A tip leads him to a 4 a.m. meeting with Amanda, a single mom whose impetuous daughter, Bella, has run off with her highly undesirable boyfriend only to be abducted by the baddies. Meanwhile...in the nation’s capital, American surveillance has determined that Iran is on the cusp of nuclear armament. The only way to stop them is unleashing an unpiloted and untested super plane with massive destructive power. The book’s treatment of Iran’s “existential threat to the entire globe” as a subplot is rather curious, to say the least. You keep waiting for Bentley to connect the two stories, but that happens only superficially. Late in the book, we are told as an afterthought that Iran’s immediate threat had been “mitigated.” Unfortunately, there is no mitigation of the novel’s hackneyed prose—"The analytical portion of Jack’s brain couldn’t help but be impressed.”
Lots of violent action with little payoff.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422816
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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