A thrilling start to a new series starring a complex assassin.
When his pregnant wife is killed in the couple’s mob-torched Brooklyn business, an Iraq War veteran sets out on a mission for payback.
Nees’ (After the Fall, 2016) latest novel serves as the origin story of Dan Stone, former military sniper and current assassin. Six months after Dan and his wife, Rita, opened a neighborhood restaurant, made man Joey Batone shows up offering “protection” for a fee. After Dan turns him down, he and Joey punch it out, and the mobster gets whooped. In retaliation, Joey sends a flash-bang grenade into Dan and Rita’s restaurant, burning it to the ground. Working late, Rita and her unborn child become collateral damage. After the funeral, Dan disappears out West for several months to sharpen his sniper skills, purchase fake IDs and weapons, and master the art of disguise. When he secretly returns to New York, he interferes with Mafia shakedowns and kills some mobsters close to Joey but not the murderer himself. Dan wants Joey to sweat, and the sweat indeed pours out of him. He knows Dan is out to kill him and that the mob is turning on him too because he’s causing it problems. The Mafia wants Dan found, as do the cops, the FBI, and CIA operative Jane Tanner. Her task is to groom terrorist assassins to work for the agency. She needs to find killers who are “not so amoral that they would turn on her or the agency when a better offer” comes along. Jane calculates Dan is an ideal candidate, but locating and wooing him before anyone else gets to him is a challenge. Jane is one of several strong, smart women in this well-executed thriller. When an FBI agent suggests to her that not two people, but only one—Rita—died in the restaurant fire, Jane counters, “She was pregnant. We women think about that.” The dialogue is convincing and tailored to the characters. In addition, the storyline is intricate without seeming over-the-top. Dan’s a multifaceted antihero amid a group of intriguing characters on both sides of the law, with some walking the fine line between the two.
A thrilling start to a new series starring a complex assassin.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-975893-29-3
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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