A strong hero hasn’t lost his mojo in this welcome return of a thriller series.
In this fourth installment of a thriller series, a former terrorist becomes compelled by shadowy figures to emerge from anonymity to facilitate the “heist of the century.”
After renouncing his past (but still haunted by the deaths in which he played a part), ex-terrorist Pascual Rose has made a concerted effort to live off the grid. But a six-word text message (“Come join us on the terrace”) shatters the nondescript life he lives in Barcelona as a freelance translator with his wife, a popular singer, and son. Two mysterious operatives make him an offer he cannot refuse. He is to lead the efforts in a clandestine operation “for the benefit of parties you may or may not sympathize with, but who pose no direct threat to anything or anyone you hold dear.” For his role in setting up holding companies in strategic locations around the world, he will be paid a million euros. Ironically, Rose’s anonymity is what makes him so valuable: “Pascual Rose disappeared before everything was put on the computer,” he is told. “That means we have a blank slate for creating a digital record of his activity for the last twenty or more years, starting with the irrefutable fact of his existence.” But despite implied threats to his family, Rose cannot just take their money and do the job. He uses his long dormant skills to try to stay one step ahead of his minders. It has been almost two decades since the last Rose thriller. It is not necessary to have read Martell’s previous three books to be swept up in this complex and cunning tale. The dialogue is not just recycled action clichés. When told that he will be traveling first class and will need to expand his wardrobe, Rose remarks, “It’s a costume drama, is it?” “It is. And you’ve got the lead role,” he is told. Less tech-savvy readers will not find the machinations of the operation too daunting. In Rose, they will discover an empathetic hero caught in a precarious struggle to do the right thing and make peace with his past.
A strong hero hasn’t lost his mojo in this welcome return of a thriller series.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951938-05-5
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Dunn Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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