An exciting spy novel partly based on historical events is excellent as a stand-alone but even more enjoyable if you read...
A British doctor who doubles as spy makes a dangerous trip to occupied Belgium during World War I.
When starchy housekeeper Mrs. Rachel Harrop catches the butler, the parlormaid, and two housemaids listening outside the study door of quiet banker Mr. Jowett, she’s shocked until she hears a bit of what Jowett and his wife are saying. Then gunshots ring out. The police call it a murder-suicide, but the fact that the bank is owned by a wealthy German-American whose son, Paul Diefenbach, actually runs it arouses suspicions, especially since Paul is missing, supposedly on a trip to South America. The investigation becomes more urgent when a Belgian priest reports overhearing a conversation between two men and a woman who are discussing kidnapping a child and mention the names Jowett and Sister Marie-Eugenie. Sir Charles Talbot, who runs a highly secret intelligence service, immediately calls upon Dr. Anthony Brooke, who along with his clever wife, Tara, is familiar with both the nun and the orphanage in Belgium from Brooke’s early brush with German machinations and the evil use of a little girl known only as Milly (Frankie’s Letter, 2013, etc.). Further investigation turns up clues to blackmail plots, an attack on Jowett’s stepson, and the knife-wielding woman whom the priest overheard agreeing to be a nursemaid and possibly a murderer. Only Brooke’s hair-raising trip to the Belgian orphanage to rescue Milly sets the authorities on the path to the truth.
An exciting spy novel partly based on historical events is excellent as a stand-alone but even more enjoyable if you read Frankie’s Letter first.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8726-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by...
A massive feel-good technology firm takes an increasingly totalitarian shape in this cautionary tale from Eggers (A Hologram for the King, 2012, etc.).
Twenty-four-year-old Mae feels like the luckiest person alive when she arrives to work at the Circle, a California company that’s effectively a merger of Google, Facebook, Twitter and every other major social media tool. Though her job is customer-service drudgework, she’s seduced by the massive campus and the new technologies that the “Circlers” are working on. Those typically involve increased opportunities for surveillance, like the minicameras the company wants to plant everywhere, or sophisticated data-mining tools that measure every aspect of human experience. (The number of screens at Mae’s workstation comically proliferate as new monitoring methods emerge.) But who is Mae to complain when the tools reduce crime, politicians allow their every move to be recorded, and the campus cares for her every need, even providing health care for her ailing father? The novel reads breezily, but it’s a polemic that’s thick with flaws. Eggers has to intentionally make Mae a dim bulb in order for readers to suspend disbelief about the Circle’s rapid expansion—the concept of privacy rights are hardly invoked until more than halfway through. And once they are invoked, the novel’s tone is punishingly heavy-handed, particularly in the case of an ex of Mae's who wants to live off the grid and warns her of the dehumanizing consequences of the Circle’s demand for transparency in all things. (Lest that point not be clear, a subplot involves a translucent shark that’s terrifyingly omnivorous.) Eggers thoughtfully captured the alienation new technologies create in his previous novel, A Hologram for the King, but this lecture in novel form is flat-footed and simplistic.
Though Eggers strives for a portentous, Orwellian tone, this book mostly feels scolding, a Kurt Vonnegut novel rewritten by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-35139-3
Page Count: 504
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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