With so much betraying going on, the author finds himself forced to explain and explicate at length, generating the kind of...
It’s 1961, the Bay of Pigs is just around the corner and suddenly Havana is hit-man heaven.
Smart, tough, charismatic Fidel Castro is the Cuban people’s choice. Everyone else, it begins to seem, has chosen him for their enemy’s list. The CIA wants him dead, as does the Mafia. Surprisingly enough, so does the KGB, for reasons too darkly geopolitical to clarify here. At any rate, Havana has become a convention center for cold-blooded killers. Into this mean-spirited mélange wanders Professor Mikhail Lammeck, historian and world-class expert in assassination. Well, not wanders exactly—Lammeck is there because he’s convinced that a Castro assassination is inevitable, and that his new book will profit immeasurably from his having borne witness. All this makes him interesting to Bud Calendar of the CIA’s Special Operations Division—a polite label for hit man. Agent Calendar’s current objective is the untimely demise of Castro, and he makes no bones about it. To this end, he intends to recruit Lammeck whether he likes it or not. Say no, Lammeck is warned, and be prepared to endure a variety of humiliating/painful/life-altering experiences. Lammeck caves. But Havana is a place where alliances are things of the moment, and betrayal, as the title suggests, is the name of the game. At times, Calendar will betray Lammeck, who will betray Calendar, who has already betrayed the Mafia, and is ever prepared to betray anyone who doesn’t carry the CIA’s imprimatur. As for Castro—despite bullets, bombs, poisons and the like—he continues somehow to stand defiant.
With so much betraying going on, the author finds himself forced to explain and explicate at length, generating the kind of yada-yada that stops a suspense novel dead in its tracks. Robbins (The Assassins Gallery, 2006, etc.) has done better work.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-553-80442-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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