Fast, furious Clancy fare, fun even though you already know who wins.
Bentley keeps Jack Ryan Jr.’s life exciting in this latest grand-scale Tom Clancy adventure.
Ryan is in Tel Aviv on an “asset-validation exercise” for a private company referred to as The Campus, and he takes time to hang out at the beach. There, he sees a woman with a child who he can tell is autistic, and he saves her from a knife-wielding attacker. She’s flummoxed; who’d want to hurt her? When mother and son leave, Ryan wants to return the boy’s dropped Captain America toy. “What could go wrong with that?” he muses naïvely. Only three hell-raising threats in one day. Almost immediately he meets agents from Israeli security, Shin Bet. Who is he? What’s he doing there? But though he doesn’t lie about his name, no one ever exclaims, “Wow, you have the same name as the U.S. president. Any connection?” Anyway, Chinese State Security is also interested in the woman, and Jack doesn’t know why. And then mother and son are kidnapped. True to the Clancy style, what begins as the attempted return of a toy mushrooms into a threat of global conflict—“no good deed goes unpunished” is an apt cliché. Other enemies include Iran's Quds Force, an apocalyptic cult—and some smart jihadis, because “the dumb jihadis died a long time ago.” Ryan is a fierce warrior when the need arises, and he refuses a direct order to return to the U.S.: “Sorry, sir…no can do. I’ve got two innocents still at risk—a mother and child.” So even when the bad guys try to crucify him, “nobody did cornered junkyard dog better than Jack.” Meanwhile, an airborne threat may destroy Tel Aviv. The story has some nice wordplay, with helicopters “clawing for altitude like homesick angels,” and the F-35 being “part ballerina, part racehorse, and all killer.” While on the ground “blood flowed and bones broke,” and a female fighter jock has the final say.
Fast, furious Clancy fare, fun even though you already know who wins.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18813-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Screwy but scarrry!
Frightened by the “Other Mommy” in her bedroom closet who asks her, "Can I go into your heart?,” lonely 8-year-old Bela enters into a horrific waking nightmare involving her whole family.
Set in the fictional small town of Chaps, Michigan, near the other made-up places in dread specialist Malerman’s novels, the story involves a deeply troubled family. Bela’s actual mommy has been cheating on her father, Daddo, whose friendliness and good cheer clash with his wife’s dark streak. Wrapped up in their squabbling and work demands, they’ve neglected to pay attention to Bela. Sweetly seductive in the beginning, Other Mommy offers Bela, who blames herself for the whole mess, a solution. They will trade places, with the Babadook-like presence reincarnated in the girl, and the girl...who knows where she’ll go. “Whatever you do, most of all, don’t allow someone else’s meanness, someone else’s cruelty, to get inside of you,” Daddo lectures Bela. Soon enough, a screaming, shape-shifting version of Other Mommy is revealed to everyone, leading the family to run off to an assortment of supposedly safe places and bring in experts in the spirit business to get rid of Other Mommy. Leave it to Mom and Dad to get so caught up in their plight that they miss half of what Bela has to say. As a result of long monologues about secrets and lost innocence and such, the book loses some of its edge. And though Bela may well be little more than a stick figure by design, that deprives the novel of a deeper dimension. That said, Malerman keeps us in his grip, as he did in his best book, Bird Box (2014). The novel isn’t the original that Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is, but it still deserves a place alongside it on anyone’s Halloween bookshelf.
Screwy but scarrry!Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593723128
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.
A reality TV paradise becomes a nightmare for the show’s unlucky contestants.
Lyla Santiago and Nico Reese have been dating for more than two years, and she’s beginning to feel like their relationship may be hitting a wall; she loves him, but his main focus at 28 is on his acting career, while, at 32, scientist Lyla is starting to dream about settling down. When Nico pleads with her to join him on a new reality TV show, One Perfect Couple, Lyla views it as an opportunity to see whether their relationship can go the distance—in reality as well as on TV. They arrive on a remote Indonesian island to find blue waters, white sands, romantic huts, and eight other contestants, all beautiful, glamorous, and clearly committed to bolstering their visibility by competing on the show. The director seems a bit shady; he insists (as their contract demands) that they turn in all electronics, plies them with booze, and then leaves with the crew—and the first ousted contestant. That night, a huge storm sweeps across the island. The next morning reveals a fatality among the wreckage: a hut and its inhabitant have been crushed by a tree, and the outbuildings have been destroyed. The remaining contestants are cut off from all communication, with the exception of one radio, and there is a very limited supply of food and water. So Love Island becomes Survivor, and one person in particular is set on being the last person standing. Ware offers another take on the locked-room mystery, but this time, her focus is less on creating a creepy atmosphere of dread, as she did in earlier novels, than on showing the absolute brutality of which some humans are capable. But she still has a good time herself: There’s a funny self-referential line to an earlier novel, plus some female characters MacGyver-ing a battery. The prolific Ware continues to stretch herself, taking on something new in each novel and writing strong—and increasingly kick-ass—female characters.
The most cinematic Ruth Ware novel so far.Pub Date: May 21, 2024
ISBN: 9781668025598
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
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