Readers of a certain age will enjoy these recent stories by the author of First Blood (the novel that inspired the Rambo...
Morrell's (Ruler of the Night, 2016, etc.) third collection, largely consisting of works from the past decade, ranges from eerie tales to CIA narratives to stories featuring literary legends.
In "The Companions," one of the stories inspired by events in Morrell's life, a screenwriter and his wife have a series of strange life-changing encounters with a monk and his elderly friend at the Santa Fe opera house. In "Blue Murder," one of three stories featuring Cavanaugh, a top-rated security firm director known as the Protector, a female thriller writer is said to be targeted for the rumored anti-Islamic passages in her forthcoming novel. There are also stories about the torture of a renditioned Iraqi prisoner in Uzbekistan and an infamous battle during World War II pitting two units of the French Foreign Legion—one controlled by the Allies, the other by German-controlled France—against one another. Among the famous authors Morrell imagines are Arthur Conan Doyle, who needs a visit from his creation, Sherlock Holmes, to solve his own painful mysteries, and J.D. Salinger, who, fictionalized as R.J. Wentworth, is pursued by a young editor working for a conglomerate that sees a gold mine—but little else—in the reclusive author's unpublished works. Morrell, who provides personal introductions to each of the stories, openly acknowledges the influences of such writers as Hemingway and Ray Bradbury. Now in his mid-70s, he is old-school in a good way in terms of his craftsmanship and his emphasis on story and character. But by today's standards, his ironic twists can be rather mild or unconvincing. And some of the tales feel dated in other ways.
Readers of a certain age will enjoy these recent stories by the author of First Blood (the novel that inspired the Rambo movies).Pub Date: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59606-912-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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