When a scientist from Los Alamos' nuclear weapon Stockpile Stewardship Team endures a nasty divorce, converts to a jihad religion and then takes hostages in the borough of Queens, it should be no surprise that he's radioactive.
That nightmarish scenario opens the new Preston and Child (Gideon's Sword, 2011, etc.) action-adventure. Dr. Gideon Crews, a Los Alamos physicist reluctantly in service to the mysterious Effective Engineering Solutions, is quickly co-opted into the multi-agency investigation attempting to locate the nuclear weapon supposedly built by the rogue scientist. The ESS's shadowy head, Eli Glinn, assigns Crews to work with Stone Fordyce, a cappuccino-swilling FBI agent liaising with NEST, the federal Nuclear Emergency Support Team. The mismatched pair examine the radiation-poisoned stand-off scene, eavesdrop on radio chatter, discover the site where a bomb was apparently assembled and then escape New York City ahead of the nuclear terrorism panic. They head to Santa Fe and Los Alamos, with a side trip to the mountain lair of a Branch Davidian-like cult, a compound from which the two escape after a bizarre fencing duel involving cattle prods and chain saws. They meet an Italian-American iman, face deadly sabotage as they follow another lead, and then things come a cropper for Crews when jihadist rantings and compromising emails are discovered on his computer. Fordyce and the federal alphabet agencies now suspect Crews too is a terrorist. What follows is a cinematic chase around Los Alamos, with movie set pyrotechnics, hidden tunnels under the nuclear laboratory and outlandish mountaintop escapes from dogs and helicopters, with Crews one step ahead of his pursuers while dragging along Alida Blaine, daughter of a bestselling novelist, as hostage turned accomplice. Like the investigators "drowning in false leads, red herrings, and conspiracy theories," the novel is slow to get underway but once Crews is accused, the action zigzags like an out-of-control rocket toward a double-deceptive conclusion. With sufficient Crews back story to give new readers the low-down, the authors adhere to a winning formula.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-564373
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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
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
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