Above-average action-adventure with a touch of noir. This one is good fun.
USMC Lt. Rollie Waters remains mired in the misdeeds of a greedy and ghoulish cabal in Rich’s (Caravan of Thieves, 2012) second action-adventure novel.
As the saga begins, the crime uncovered in Thieves is the same but exacerbated. Waters’ con-man father, Dan, had uncovered a conspiracy that looted millions of Saddam’s dollars after the invasion of Iraq, all supposedly shipped home in caskets of troops killed in action. Dan was murdered by the conspirators, but Waters got revenge. That involvement brought combat veteran Waters to the attention of mysterious Maj. Hensel of SHADE (Shared Defense Executive), an uber-secret spinoff of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Hensel suspects the purloined money is to finance a conspiracy to control Kurd oil resources. Waters, SHADE-assigned to exhume graves to unearth the millions, becomes an assassin’s target. The shooting brings Waters’ investigation unwelcome FBI attention, and so Henley dresses Waters up as Robert Hewitt, oil speculator, and dispatches him to Houston to meet the self-styled king of Kurdistan. The action moves from Houston to Erbil, Iraq’s Kurd stronghold. Waters is pursuing a one-eyed Welshman named Bannion who has supposedly kidnapped Maya, his own ex-wife and the king’s daughter. Rich is a film writer, with a firm grip on pacing, always ready to stop and flesh out characters and then to pull a knife and draw a little blood. Waters is the perfect edgy, flawed hero—"loaded up five cylinders for Russian roulette with chivalry, gallantry, righteousness, sincerity and plain old lust"—and Rich’s supporting cast is solid. Bannion is Machiavellian evil. Gill, supposedly Bannion’s silent muscle, is three layers deep. Pushing credibility is Ethan Williams, a purported hippie drug dealer Waters once rescued in Afghanistan and who is now in Bannion’s employ. The adventure unreels in first person from Waters’ point of view, and Rich uses a nifty narrative device—Waters’ interior dialogue with his dead con-man father—to flesh out the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t machinations of the bad guys.
Above-average action-adventure with a touch of noir. This one is good fun.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95323-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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