Action-adventure with a macabre, sometimes-fantastical flair.
Aloysius Pendergast, an enormously wealthy FBI special agent with a go-it-alone, 007–like brief, is presumed dead at sea after helping a Massachusetts friend. Gloom prevails at his fabulous mansion on New York City’s Riverside Drive.
Preston and Child (Crimson Shore, 2015, etc.) find Pendergast’s factotum extraordinaire, Proctor, keeping a stiff upper lip. Pendergast’s beautiful ward, Constance Greene, is doubly depressed: her mentor’s apparent death was preceded by his rejection of her declaration of love. Then Proctor believes he sees Constance being kidnapped. There are clues, and Proctor’s emergency go-bag contains a major stash of cash, so he charters jets and pursues the kidnappers to Namibia. There, the bad guys hack his SUV's computer, stranding him in the desolation of the Kalahari Desert. As this transpires, Pendergast is being held captive at sea after being rescued by a drug runner’s fishing boat. The crew decides to ransom their wily prisoner; he objects and sends the craft and crew to the bottom. Meanwhile, Proctor's protection lured away, Constance is approached by Pendergast’s murderous brother, Diogenes, also presumed dead (volcano, not ocean). Declaring his own rehabilitation and undying true love, Diogenes takes a reluctant Constance to a paradise refuge on Florida’s Halcyon Key. Returning to New York, Pendergast finds the mansion empty, gathers clues, and begins pursuit. Once again the plot further pushes probability’s limits while keeping the excitement meter pegged. Those new to the Pendergast world may stumble over references to the Gsalrig Chongg monastery (refuge of Constance’s son by Diogenes) and the machinations of Pendergast ancestor Enoch Leng, inventor of an immortality potion made from "cauda equina—the bundle of nerves at the base of the spine," which must be harvested from the newly dead. Dialogue sometimes arrives as staged pronouncements, and there’s occasional overwriting—"his features slowly twisting into a horrible grimace of mirth"—but the fast-paced novel speeds over such potholes.
Action-adventure with a macabre, sometimes-fantastical flair.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3691-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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