Pendergast—an always-black-clad pale blond polymath, gaunt yet physically deadly, an FBI agent operating without supervision...
Preston and Child’s (Cold Vengeance, 2011, etc.) thriller completes the Helen trilogy featuring the weird and unworldly Aloysius Pendergast, special agent for the FBI.
The conclusion opens with Pendergast called to meet Helen, the wife he presumed dead, in New York City’s Central Park. There’s a touching, tentative reunion, and then Der Bund strikes again, kidnapping Helen and leaving Pendergast wounded. Pendergast offers a treatise on detection perfection, tracing Helen from hither and yon to Sonora, Mexico. There’s another shootout. Helen’s killed, and principal bad guy, Wulf Konrad Fischer, escapes. Pendergast retreats to his Dakota apartment in New York City and into a grief-and-guilt-driven drug addiction. Friends intervene. Lt. D’Agosta, city police detective, pleads for Pendergast to help search for a serial killer. Corrie Swanson, criminal justice student, is in danger after stumbling on a Nazi safe house in her quest to help Pendergast. With Pendergast’s aid, Corrie takes refuge with her estranged father, only to find him framed for a bank robbery. Psychiatrist Dr. John Felder discovers the institutionalized Constance Greene may truly be a century and a half old. Pendergast, intrigued by the bizarre serial murders, applies DNA analysis, which leads him to think the murderer is his brother Diogenes, a villain supposedly dead in a Sicilian volcano. Further analysis reveals truths even more grotesque. The most simplistic of the narratives follows Corrie clearing her father; the most gothic follows Felder seeking proof of Greene’s age; and the most violent follows Pendergast as he uncovers secrets about Helen and then takes revenge by breaching a Nazi refuge in Brazil. Pendergast’s narrative offers angst and ample bloodletting in gothic locales and confrontations with the issue of Mengele’s twins experiments mated with quantum mechanics and genetic manipulation. If Preston and Child fans haven’t read the first two volumes in the Helen trilogy, confusion will reign.
Pendergast—an always-black-clad pale blond polymath, gaunt yet physically deadly, an FBI agent operating without supervision or reprimand—lurks at the dark, sharp edge of crime fiction protagonists.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-55499-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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
SEEN & HEARD
This thriller aims right for the heart and never lets go.
A tense thriller explores the bond between sisters and family dynamics that give new meaning to the term “dysfunctional.”
Three years ago, 17-year-old Emma Tanner and her 15-year-old sister, Cassandra, left home, disappearing into the night; as Walker's (All Is Not Forgotten, 2016, etc.) book opens, Cass shows up at her family’s house—without Emma. Dr. Abby Walker of the FBI, a forensic psychiatrist who’s been on the case from the beginning, is desperate to find out what happened and to find Emma before it’s too late. Cass tells Abby she and Emma had been arguing the night they took off and that it soon became obvious that Emma was packing up to leave. Cass, hoping to get her sister in trouble, hid in the car when Emma drove off, heading to the beach, where she was met by a man and woman Cass didn't recognize. When Cass revealed herself, they decided to take her with them as they left for a remote island off the coast of Maine. Emma was pregnant, Cass says, and the couple had offered to help her, but what they really had planned was to keep the baby for themselves. Cass finally managed to escape, she says, but without Emma. It’s a harrowing tale, and Cass says all she wants is to find Emma, but Abby suspects she's hiding something. Cass’ first-person narrative, interspersed with Abby’s investigation, paints a shocking picture of Cass’ ordeal and her family’s disturbing history. Her mother, Judy Martin, has always used her beauty and charm to manipulate her family, and her girls had to flatter her to win her affection. She was jealous of the attention given to her beautiful daughters, which threatened her fragile ego, and she was always scheming to get what she wanted—even seducing her stepson, Hunter, who was obsessed with Emma. Cass is a survivor, forced to become an adult very quickly, and readers will root for her as she tells her disturbing story and looks back on what could have been, when hope was all she and Emma had.
This thriller aims right for the heart and never lets go.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-14143-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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