Wonderful setting; rich, colorful cast, headed by a valiant/vulnerable protagonist who makes empathy easy. Impossibly...
Out of post-apartheid South Africa comes a thriller good enough to and nip at the heels of le Carré.
Thobela Mpayipheli is six-foot-three, a giant of a man so (naturally) they call him “Tiny.” During the Struggle, he was an ANC (African National Congress) hero, a ferocious and decorated fighter. But that was then: Tiny’s now is Miriam Nzuluwazi, the “tall, lean, strong and beautiful woman” who kisses him each night when he arrives home from his low-level, low-profile job in Cape Town. Miriam, her small son, their small house, that’s Tiny modest life—and it’s a life he loves. But the advent of a perfectly ordinary woman named Monica Kleintjes sends it crashing. Monica is the daughter of old comrade Johnny Kleintjes, who is in serious trouble, and to whom Tiny owes a debt of honor. If he fails to deliver a certain information-packed disk to a certain blood-thirsty band of terrorists, Johnny's a dead man, Monica tells him, handing him the disk. Tiny, a closet Romantic, as perhaps all great warriors are at their core, believes he has no choice but to accept the mission. Naturally, the disk turns out to be eagerly sought by a variety of inimical entities: among them, the CIA, al Qaeda, and the still fledgling South African government. As he zigzags through Africa on a stolen motorcycle, Tiny, now an object of intense and frequently murderous interest, tries, for the sake of survival, to sort out the conflicting realities governing his situation. He discovers, however, that like the desperate ex-hero on the BMW bike, “the truth is a moving target.”
Wonderful setting; rich, colorful cast, headed by a valiant/vulnerable protagonist who makes empathy easy. Impossibly convoluted, of course—hey, it’s a suspense novel—but fans of the genre won’t want to miss Meyer’s US debut.Pub Date: July 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-93549-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.
Sparks fly as a woman with extraordinary abilities fights her attraction to a dangerous freelance consultant.
Dr. Kendra Michaels has worked with former FBI Agent Adam Lynch before (Double Blind, 2018), but she’s furious with him for getting her tossed out of Afghanistan after she sustained a minor wound while trying to root out corruption. Kendra, who was blind until an experimental operation restored her sight at 20, has highly developed senses of smell, hearing, and spatial awareness that she’s used to help the FBI and CIA in many difficult cases. Now, as she returns to the U.S., they have another one she can’t resist investigating. Elaine Wessler and Ronald Kim, both staff members at her old school, the Woodward Academy for the Physically Disabled in Oceanside, California, have been found murdered for no apparent reason, and FBI Special Agent Michael Griffin is anxious to use her skills and inside knowledge. Elaine had been fostering an unusual guide dog, Harley, who's had problems adjusting since the child he was working with was killed in a gas-main explosion. Now that Elaine is gone, his unearthly howls are upsetting the students. Kendra talks her best friend, Olivia, who’s blind, into sharing custody of Harley until they can find him the right home. Meanwhile, she turns up clues the FBI team missed and is rewarded for her efforts with a bomb planted in her car. It turns out to be fake, but it’s still a potent warning to walk away. Returning from Afghanistan to help Kendra, Lynch finds her still angry with him and intent on resisting his charms. Her friend Jessie Mercado, a private eye, turns up to help extricate her from a dangerous situation and sticks around to join the hunt for the killers. It will take all of them, including Harley, to solve the violent, complex case and get the school Kendra loves back on track.
Mystery, danger, and sexual tension abound in an action-packed thriller that breaks plenty of heads but no new ground.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6292-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.
An angry ex-wife is stalking a young, innocent fiancee who is a carbon copy of her former self…or so it seems.
The use of a multiviewpoint, chronologically complex narrative to create suspense by purposely misleading the reader is a really, really popular device. Two words: Gone Girl. While we are not the fools we once were and now assume immediately that we are being played, the question is whether we still take pleasure in the twists and revelations that follow. Pekkanen (The Perfect Neighbors, 2016, etc.) and Hendricks’ debut collaboration falls into the first wife/second wife subgenre of this type of story (e.g., The Girl Before, The Last Mrs. Parrish). In all of these, an unbelievably handsome, wildly successful, secretive, rigid, orderly, and controlling husband—here it’s Richard, a 36-year-old hedge fund manager with “a runner’s wiry build and an easy smile that belied his intense navy-blue eyes”—marries the same type of woman more than once, sometimes more than twice. Of course, he’s not who he seems. Perhaps the female characters are not, either. Here, we meet Nellie, an adorable New York preschool teacher who is not quite sure she wants to give up the fun, shoestring, highly social lifestyle she shares with her roomie to move to a sterile suburb with Richard. But the wedding date—of course he hasn’t even told her the location, just “buy a new bikini”—draws ever closer. Something bad happened to Nellie in Florida a long time ago that has made her anxious and hypervigilant. Meanwhile, Vanessa, the spurned wife, lives with her artist Aunt Charlotte (a great character), is boozing heavily, and is about to lose her job at Saks. She’s stalking Nellie, determined to prevent the marriage at all costs. Since you know there’s got to be more to it than this, the fun is in trying to figure it out before they tell you. We didn’t! One of the subplots, the one about the bad thing in Florida, was fresher than the main plot—maybe Hendricks and Pekkanen should have written a whole book about that.
Easy to read, smoothly put together. A good airport book.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13092-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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