While Koontz's second effort featuring Jane Hawk may satisfy his longtime fans, his new heroine too often seems stuck on...
In this sequel to The Silent Corner (2017), former FBI agent Jane Hawk continues her fight against an evil conspiracy that has been brainwashing people with nanomachines.
The 27-year-old Hawk is a former agent—and the most wanted woman in America—because she's been taking out the bad guys responsible for the murder of her husband and other killings made to look like suicides. Traveling alone, in disguise, and doing all she can to avoid the surveillance of government agencies that have been infiltrated by the conspiracy, she's after the murderous billionaire whose California biotech firm developed the microscopic “control mechanisms” being injected into people's bloodstreams. Among their living victims: young women turned into robotic hostesses at private sex clubs. Hawk gains an ally in black cop Luther Tillman after a kindly teacher in his Minnesota town unthinkably drives a car bomb into a hotel and kills 42 people, including the governor and a congressman. Koontz had his work cut out for him trying to match the terrific first installment in the series. But as solid as the storytelling is here, it lacks the spark and suspense of The Silent Corner. Too many of the scenes in this 500-plus page book are stretched out for no reason. And Hawk, so charismatic the last time around, is largely reduced to a pitiless avenger who resorts to her own kind of cruelty.
While Koontz's second effort featuring Jane Hawk may satisfy his longtime fans, his new heroine too often seems stuck on autopilot—a major disappointment considering how lively she was in her debut.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-345-54680-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.
Veste’s moody procedural tells the story of a pair of Liverpool detectives tracking a killer influenced by local mythology.
Louise Henderson, the investigator at the heart of this novel, is a detective with secrets. She keeps some from her partner, DS Shipley; when the book opens, she’s also grappling with moments of sudden and inexplicable terror that leave her unsure of their origin and unsettled by their impact on her. Soon, the detectives take up the case of a woman who escaped a deadly attack—and who believes it was the work of the title character, a local legend who may be a murderer, a supernatural creature, or something else entirely. Not long after that, a dead body shows up, which suggests a connection to an earlier death, but a host of loose ends hang for the detectives to piece together—and there’s also the matter of a series of flashbacks set years earlier, when a teenager vanished. How these seemingly disparate elements connect—sometimes linearly, sometimes via well-made twists—leads the novel to its conclusion. Veste’s slow-burning approach works well, sustaining the sense of general wrongness that gives the narrative so much atmosphere. There are a few heavy-handed moments here and there. “They thought they knew evil. They had no idea” is perhaps the most flagrant example; as this book is either about a serial killer or an urban legend come to life, that sense of menace is already built in to the narrative well enough. But the conclusion is largely satisfying, playing well off the dynamics Veste established over the course of the story.
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7129-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong...
More Scandinavian psychopathy from the pseudonymous husband-wife team.
Sometimes a boy needs his dad. It being a Shakespearean world, sometimes a boy just needs to kill his dad, even if the paternity is not firmly established—in which instance you can bet on plenty of collateral damage. In Kepler’s newest, the bodies stack up quickly. The first to fall is Sweden’s foreign minister, who is decidedly not a nice guy and has his eyes shot out for his transgressions. That’s not the least icky of the ugly fates visited on the so-called Rabbit Hunter’s victims, as when the killer gazes meaningfully at one of them and “decides that he’s going to cut his legs off and watch him crawl like a snail through his own blood.” Against this gruesome backdrop, only Joona Linna, the ethnically Finnish Swedish supercop, stands a chance of sussing out what’s going on. Trouble is, he’s in the slammer, having been locked away in a maximum security prison for the last two years for his part in events that unfolded in Stalker (2019). It’s only when the prime minister, suspecting that his foreign minister’s death has come at the hands of terrorists, intercedes to make Joona “a highly unorthodox offer” that he can swing back into action with Stockholm cop Saga Bauer and figure out why it is that the trail of blood leads to a TV studio by way of a Chicago psychiatric hospital. As always, along with the many bodies left behind by the “spree killer,” there’s a shoal of red herrings in Kepler’s narrative—human smugglers here, Afghan refugees and the FBI there—and all sorts of ancillary unpleasantries, from rape to evisceration and the chilling thought that when the Rabbit Killer’s victims finally die, various bits of their bodies removed, “the world becomes completely still, like a winter landscape."
Fast-paced and fluent, with all the authors’ trademark stratagems. Sure to be a hit, though best read by those with strong stomachs.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3228-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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