A fast-paced novel with all the ingredients for a bestseller.
From Washington Post columnist Ignatius (The Sun King, 1999, etc.), one of the new breed of post-9/11 thrillers, involving Middle East foreign policy, political intrigue, convoluted intelligence operations and the ubiquitous CIA.
Former Time magazine reporter Roger Ferris has joined the CIA, and after a terrorist bombing in Berlin develops an obsessive desire to take down “Suleiman,” a key al-Qaeda operative whose true identity is unknown. With the help of his boss, crusty Near East Division Chief Ed Hoffman, Ferris begins a journey of deception in which he tries to play an innocent middle-eastern architect to flush out and reveal Suleiman and ultimately take down his whole terrorist operation. But what of the motives of Hani Salaam, the smooth and unruffled chief of the General Intelligence Department in Jordan? He desperately wants to be a part of the operation—but is he a victim of manipulation, or himself a master of the game? The action takes place in Washington and Jordan, where “hypocrisy was mother’s milk.” Lies, deception, manipulation and hypocrisy pervade the atmosphere like thick, acrid smoke from a Turkish cigarette. Ferris is caught not only between competing policies (mainly illicit) but also between competing women—his wife, Gretchen, herself a master manipulator on the domestic front, and Alice Melville, who aids Palestinians in refugee camps and who views lies, rather than truth, as dangerous. In contrast, Ferris works under the cynical yet pragmatic assumption that “this was a business where any action was sanctioned, so long as it worked.” Ironically, however, Ferris develops his own brand of idealism—after all, he’s dedicated to his mission to take down the “bad guys,” and there are, in fact, dangerous people out there. Ferris chillingly counts on undermining truth with doubt, “the great destroyer,” and ultimately uncovers secrets about his own past as well.
A fast-paced novel with all the ingredients for a bestseller.Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-06503-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Part budding romance, part compelling backstory, part prescient tale of racism: provocative on all fronts without being...
In the wake of family tragedy, does an oldest sister’s disappearance point to something even more nefarious?
As a child in Bartonville, Oregon, Emily Mills saw something terrible that she hasn’t been able to forget for 20 years. Even worse than seeing the body of her father, who was white, hanging from a tree in the backyard was seeing her older sister, Tara, at the scene of the crime. Tara leaves town and isn’t heard from again, so Emily can’t ask what she was doing there the fateful night their father was murdered. When their mother takes her own life shortly afterward, Emily and her youngest sister, Madison, never recover from the multiple traumas. Although they do their best to go on running Barton Diner, the family restaurant, Emily fears that her questions may never be answered. Though Chet Carlson was caught and eventually confessed to the crime, he’s still in prison when history seems to repeat itself through a double murder of interracial couple Sean and Lindsay Fitch, with Emily once again cast as the person who finds the bodies. Sean has a KKK sign carved into his head, which reminds Emily of whisperings about her father's racist connections. How else might the crimes be related? Rightfully not trusting the police to do a thorough investigation, Emily calls the FBI, which dispatches agents Zander Wells and Ava McLane to investigate. Elliot (Bred in the Bone, 2019) seems less interested in setting Emily up as part of the crime than in pairing her romantically with Zander. That’s just as well, because the who and why of the crimes feels almost incidental rather than displaying a deeper connection to any larger theme.
Part budding romance, part compelling backstory, part prescient tale of racism: provocative on all fronts without being quite satisfying on any.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0672-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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