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
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally...
After a hit-and-run kills a high school student, the court of public opinion convicts a lonely outcast.
When Jackie Reed hears her 17-year-old son, Wade, sneaking out the night before the SATs, she knows she should stop him; instead, she pops a Xanax and returns to bed. At 4 a.m., Jackie’s 13-year-old, Connor, wakes to find a rain-soaked Wade hiding something in his closet; he considers tattling but promises to keep quiet. These seemingly innocuous decisions come back to haunt Jackie and Connor the next morning. While Officer Pearl Maze was working the graveyard shift at the Havenkill, New York, police department, Amy Nathanson burst through the door claiming to have been carjacked. According to Amy, her screams summoned 17-year-old Liam Miller, whom the thief ran over during his escape. The cops canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, and the Reeds are stunned to realize that Wade matches the suspect’s description. Evidence mounts against him, and the community ostracizes his family, but still Wade refuses to divulge his whereabouts at the time of the accident. The book opens with Wade’s suicide note, then flashes back five days and unfolds from the perspectives of Jackie, Connor, Pearl, and Amy. This narrative shift maximizes suspense by forcing readers to guess at Wade’s thoughts and actions, allowing Gaylin to insightfully explore the crime’s ripple effects.
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally develops between teenagers and their families and stocks it with sharks.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-264111-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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