Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favorite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.
Baldacci picks up where he left off with CIA assassins Will Robie and Jessica Reel in this no-holds-barred tale of perfidy and murder at the highest level.
The president, the director of the CIA and the president’s national security adviser meet in secret to hatch a plot to kill the dangerous and unpredictable leader of North Korea. Evan Tucker, the slimy CIA head, decides to use Robie and Reel, whose last mission ended in the deaths of other agency personnel. But first he sends them to the Burner Box, a training facility in rural North Carolina, where they’re subjected to everything from near-fatal waterboarding to food and sleep deprivation. When a North Korean operative discovers the mission and blows it out of the water, Robie and Reel are sent to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, Julie, a young girl they know from a previous mission that’s never fully explained here, is captured by a group of Nazi sympathizers intent on getting to Reel. Baldacci’s prose crackles with urgency, and both spies, although psychological messes, are at the tops of their games. But this novel’s construction proves both puzzling and distracting: Baldacci spins a compelling, although much of the time improbable, tale revolving around the failed strike at North Korea, taking up about a third of the book. The second third veers into Reel’s neo-Nazi past and takes the story so far afield that they seem like different novels. The final third returns to the Korean storyline, with the results being oddly fragmented. Some scenes set in a Korean concentration camp prove the most compelling by far, especially with their heartbreaking descriptions of lives that are almost too terrible to contemplate.
Robie and Reel fans will thrill to see their favorite spies back in action, no matter what the setting.Pub Date: April 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2123-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.
On his way to the West Coast, Jack Reacher takes a detour to New Hampshire to check out some family history in the 23rd book in Child's (The Midnight Line, 2017, etc.) series.
Laconia, New Hampshire, is the setting for the latest showcase for Reacher's unconscious talent for stirring up the latent murderous violence in any bucolic setting he chooses to enter. In this case, the hubbub comes in the form of a local mob family after Reacher unleashes his own form of discipline on a younger member of the clan when the beardless thug attempts to assault a waitress. Paid muscle is soon on the way north from Boston, but both Reacher and his constant readers know that kind of goon is never a match for him. And so Reacher and reader are free to ponder the puzzling story about our hero's past. It seems that there is no official record of Reacher's dad, who grew up in Laconia, but there is evidence to suggest he may have played a hand in the murder of a sociopath terrorizing the town in his day. All of this is intercut with the ordeal of a young Canadian couple driving south to New York to score some money by selling the goods they've got hidden away in a suitcase. Their car breaks down just outside a remote motel that, they gradually discover, is not as welcoming as it seems. It doesn't take long to figure out what's waiting for them there, though it takes a bit too long for Reacher's story to join theirs. Nevertheless, the tone doesn't go blooey here, as it has in some of the recent series entries, and the way everything winds up for all the participants shows a satisfying generosity of storytelling spirit.
The Reacher series gets back on its rough and rocky track with this latest companionable entry.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59351-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Though the heroine’s love life may be less interesting to mystery fans than her amateur sleuthing, Kies’ fiction debut lays...
A hard-living newspaperwoman juggles multiple men and battles the bottle on her way to redemption via a high-profile murder story.
Punching a cop lands Sheffield Post reporter Geneva Chase on probation, with mandatory attendance at AA meetings as a chaser. But a grisly multiple murder at wealthy George and Lynette Chadwick’s home on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound might be Genie’s ticket to redemption. The Chadwick homicides aren’t the only high-profile crime stories on her radar. She’s also following the case of Jimmy Fitzgerald, a spoiled rich kid recently arrested for murder and, in the view of Genie’s tart first-person narrative, a sociopath. Meantime, an unexpected upsurge in her love life challenges her resolve to keep her sobriety and her eye on the journalistic ball. When she runs into childhood pal Kevin Bell at an AA meeting, she finds herself drawn to his adorable awkwardness. And out of the blue, her hot ex Frank Mancini calls, wanting to rekindle a romance she’d thought was dead. As she ricochets from Frank to Kevin, Genie also toils in the trenches on various stories. She gets injured by a burglar in a HumVee while tracking a series of local robberies and gingerly explores the discreet local S&M scene’s ties to those murders. Her research on this big crime includes the history of the house and the lives of the victims.
Though the heroine’s love life may be less interesting to mystery fans than her amateur sleuthing, Kies’ fiction debut lays the groundwork for an entertaining series.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0800-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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