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
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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