An easy-to-root-for hero in a fast-paced thriller makes for entertaining reading.
Hollywood screenwriter Rich’s debut novel follows the adventures of a Marine poster boy, Lt. Roland Waters.
Son of a con man who taught him to lie, steal and cheat, Rollie joined the Corps, found a home, toured Iraq and Afghanistan and made it through officer’s candidate school. Given his natural flair for languages, Rollie was assigned undercover in Afghanistan to stop black-market weapons thefts. The Afghan action alternates with the primary narrative and injects essential back story. Recalled to Camp Pendleton when his undercover connection is killed, Rollie learns he’s being tailed, but no one takes his worries seriously. Rollie’s also a rogue general’s target, because the general’s incompetent son was ensnared in the weapons-theft sting. Rollie soon learns he’s being followed because the feds are tracing military caskets full of money, $25 million in each, stolen by a corrupt colonel from Saddam Hussein’s larder during Iraq’s liberation. With Rollie's father, Dan, in Iraq when the money disappeared, a treasury agent confronts Rollie with the suspicion the missing millions might be connected to Dan, “a con artist…a wise man who wasted his wisdom foolishly.” Now word is circulating that Dan dug up one casket from a veteran’s gravesite, and with Dan nowhere to be found, good guys and bad suspect devious Dan has the millions, and they want Rollie to find him. In a realistic story with an attention-grabbing premise, Dan becomes an entertaining character, while a measure of narrative depth comes from Rollie’s growing rapprochement with all that was gained and lost in being Dan’s son. Rich’s screenwriting skills send Rollie adventuring across the American Southwest, all while being pursued by killers, moles and spies. Although Rich displays a nice touch for descriptive phrasing—“a slurry of chain stores”—it’ll be readers with a taste for Bourne-level action who will be eager for Rollie’s next adventure.
An easy-to-root-for hero in a fast-paced thriller makes for entertaining reading.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95288-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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