A brisk but assertive tale, with plenty of spies, killers, and double-crossings to satiate readers.
In Hosmer’s debut thriller, American and Canadian law enforcement agents search for a physicist whose disappearance may be related to a weapons system he’s developing.
Lincoln Hawthorne is looking forward to a December weekend getaway at his grandfather Robert’s camp in New York. Sadly, after he arrives, he finds Robert dead with a pitchfork in his chest. Cops arrive at the scene, but the FBI quickly jumps on the case as well, as Robert was working for the U.S. Navy on a joint U.S.–Canada project involving a weapon of some sort. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that the body isn’t Robert’s at all but that of a different man wearing a latex mask. Security photos from the Naval Surface Warfare Center show the same person posing as Robert days ago, accompanied by a driver whom authorities identify as Aleksandr Yeschenko. The feds are soon convinced that Russians have taken the still-living Robert across the border into Canada. It turns out that they abducted the physicist in a ploy to trade him for the project prototype, which Canadian intelligence agent Mathieu Parise possesses. Both the U.S. and Canadian intelligence communities suspect that a mole in their midst is aiding the Russians, but the conspiracy actually goes much deeper than that. Hosmer’s short novel doesn’t dawdle, as Lincoln finds the corpse almost immediately, and it soon introduces a copious amount of characters, including officers from Canada, New York, and Virginia (Robert’s home state). The players occasionally lack distinctive personalities, but there’s definitely nuance in Lincoln’s budding relationship with FBI agent Allison Thiel. They share a bed but also go undercover together, with Allison posing as Lincoln’s wife during a precarious hostage exchange. Hosmer also gives the espionage some density; villains have varying motives, and Robert may have been developing something that even the Navy doesn’t know about. There’s danger and surprising discoveries all the way to the last few pages and a hint at the end that perhaps the story isn’t quite over.
A brisk but assertive tale, with plenty of spies, killers, and double-crossings to satiate readers.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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