The book builds in interest and intensity as, bolstered by nuanced historical color, the protagonists grow in complexity.
Against the backdrop of the first world war, a master spy's reunion with an old flame threatens to burn him to a crisp.
Downing splits his narrative between two ex-lovers, with details of the breakup included piecemeal. British agent Jack McColl is spending 1915 in India brooding about the end of his affair with American journalist Caitlin Hanley and waiting for news of his brother. Caitlin is in London, monitoring the execution of her own brother, Colm, for treasonous activities with the Irish Citizen Army. Even as McColl is called into service to help locate and intercept a German arms shipment, revolutionary stirrings simmer in India. McColl is gathering intelligence on these, and their connection to the weapons, as well. Meanwhile, Caitlin's grief intensifies her affinity for her brother's extreme politics, putting her at odds with McColl. She goes to Berlin to meet her brother's associates while McColl continues to track the gun shipment.The failure of this mission leads to McColl's reassignment to London but not before an interesting encounter with Gandhi himself. Caitlin returns to Dublin after her Continental trip and visits McColl's family in Glasgow while he pursues a new assignment in France and Holland. This character-driven thriller, second in a series by the prolific Downing (Jack of Spies, 2014), has much exposition to catch the reader up in its opening chapters, but the author provides the same authentically detailed depiction of espionage in World War I that his John Russell series offers about World War II.
The book builds in interest and intensity as, bolstered by nuanced historical color, the protagonists grow in complexity.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61695-270-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.
Hard Case revives a pair of movie-related novellas originally published under the cryptic title Enough in 1977.
A Travesty, the first and longer of these stories, opens with movie reviewer Carey Thorpe standing over the dead body of actress Laura Penney, the lover with whom his quarrel had suddenly and fatally escalated. Even though her death was technically an accident, Carey, who doesn’t want anyone connecting him with it, immediately begins concealing all indications that he was ever in her apartment. It’s all for naught: Soon he finds himself blackmailed by private detective John Edgarson and having to commit another felony to satisfy his demands. From that point on, his dilemma rapidly spirals into one of the comic nightmares in which Westlake (Brothers Keepers, 1975/2019, etc.) specialized: Moments in which he’s threatened with exposure alternate with long intervals in which NYPD DS Al Bray and especially DS Fred Staples, who’ve decided that he’s innocent, take Carey under their wings, marveling at his ability to solve murders committed by other people; then he caps his transgressions by taking Staples’ wife, Patricia, to bed. The second novella, Ordo, couldn’t be more different. The naval mates of Ordo Tupikos, a deeply ordinary San Diego sailor, tell him that Estelle Anlic, the woman whose marriage to him was annulled years ago when the courts, egged on by her mother, discovered that she was underage, has transformed herself into movie star Dawn Devayne. Against all odds, he manages to reintroduce himself to Estelle, or Dawn, but although her agent plays it as a storybook reunion, Orry just can’t find Estelle in Dawn, who’s changed a lot more than he has, and the tale ends on a note of sad resignation.
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78565-720-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.
This complex psychological thriller digs deep into the layers of trauma that linger long after a terrible crime.
This is the 17th novel by Unger (Under My Skin, 2018, etc.), and it revisits one of her frequent themes: the indelible impact of violence on the survivors of crimes. The survivor at its center is Rain Winter, who at age 12 was one of three friends who became the victims of a monster. At first glance, Rain seems to have overcome that nightmare. She’s happily married and reveling in motherhood, although she vacillates between the joy she finds in 1-year-old Lily and the tug of the job she left as a hard-charging radio news producer. That tug increases when she hears that a man whose murder trial she covered, a man who was acquitted of killing his pregnant wife, has been found dead—killed in just the same way his wife was. Rain was sure he was guilty, so she feels some dark satisfaction, and her investigative instincts (and maybe something else) are aroused when a dark web mole, tipster, and blogger tells her off the record that there have been other, very similar revenge murders, and they might be the work of the same person. That wakes her own worst memories: “There weren’t many people who remembered Rain’s ugly history. It was big news once, but it had faded in the bubbling morass of horrific crimes since then.” Its aftermath included the children’s attacker being released from prison—and murdered. Chapters describing Rain’s pursuit of the story of a possible vengeful serial killer are intercut with chapters narrated by a mysterious person from her past, one who is closer to her in the present than she knows. Unger skillfully peels back the layers of Rain’s emotional scar tissue to expose the truth of what happened in her childhood and the fear, rage, and guilt it left behind, with a series of shocking consequences.
Surviving a crime is the beginning of the story, not the end, in this astute, engrossing thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0872-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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