A highly recommended read that will make readers hope for a sequel.
A thriller that moves between Los Angeles luxury and war in the Middle East.
Williams’ (Waking Lazarus, 2016, etc.) novel opens with a rush as antiques auction-house owner and former presidential candidate Michael Hardeman frantically, and ultimately unsuccessfully, struggles to stop his Gulfstream jet from crashing into the Mojave Desert. Simultaneously, federal agents raid Hollywood, California–based Hardeman Auctions, seizing boxes of documents that might reveal a money-laundering scheme as well as other illegalities. Now that 24-year-old Chase Hardeman’s father is dead, he must deal with this investigation into the family business—an operation that pulls in hundreds of millions annually from a wealthy, A-list clientele. Helping Chase to get through these dark days are tech genius and billionaire Randall Collinsworth, whom he calls “Uncle Randy” although they’re not related; Chase’s girlfriend, Laney, who has “gunmetal blue eyes”;his best friend and fellow former soldier, Dax; and his ex-lover Elena Vihkrov, a Russian beauty. Both the crash and the raid have ties to Chase and Dax’s past activities in Mosul, where they purchased stolen antiquities from terrorist leader Abu Haji Fatima—“spoils of war” that eventually ended up at Hardeman Auctions. However, betrayal soon erodes Chase’s support system, and his life becomes as turbulent as his father’s doomed flight. Fatima’s right-hand man, Akram Kasim, and his crew pursue Chase in a nightclub, and although he escapes the venue, a bloodbath soon ensues. Williams delivers an exciting, well-executed thriller. The major characters occupy a grey area between good and bad; even Chase admits that he and his dad were mixed up with the wrong people: “I was no Boy Scout. Sins of a father and son—committed far more often than we ever admitted,” he reveals. The danger is palpable, and women get meaty roles as agents, terrorists, lovers, and combinations of the three. Conversations seem realistic, such as when Elena softly begs Chase to stay the night; after he says that he can’t, Elena smiles coyly and says, “She must be special.” If only Dax would call Chase “bro” slightly less often, the book would be near-perfect.
A highly recommended read that will make readers hope for a sequel.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Forgotten Stories, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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