Chapman again delivers a crisp thriller, tapping themes of our times that daily news has made commonplace. And once again he...
Terrorism, economic warfare, and “too big to fail” banks lend this thriller a sense of urgency.
Who knew international economics, the Federal Reserve Bank, and a room full of geeks could be so much fun, though Chapman gave us a hint in the first novel in this series, The Ascendant (2014). Things aren't good for Garrett Reilly: constant agony from a skull fracture drives him to take painkillers by the fistful as he searches for patterns of trades in his job on Wall Street. “Seeing patterns came naturally to him; he felt them as much as saw them.” And see one he does—a "dark pool" of money has been "buying and selling stocks in coordination with real-world events"—a stock would take a tumble, and then a seemingly random, unrelated crime would take place somewhere around the world. Just as Reilly notices the pattern, it sweeps him up: someone kills the president of the New York Federal Reserve, then implicates Reilly in the crime before putting a gun to her own head. The novel takes off in a hunt to find out why. Enter Russian bad guy Ilya Markov, economic assassin and Reilly’s intellectual doppelgänger. Markov learns the patterns of potential pawns and uses their predictability for his master plan. Reilly knows he needs more eyes watching, researching, in order to find this expert manipulator and calls on Ascendant, his team of misfits, not happy to be together again after their first engagement with the turbulent and arrogant Reilly. Garrett puts together a profile from the crime patterns, and when a passport triggers an alert, the team focuses on Markov, who's in deep cover for a Russian-sponsored attack on the economy of the United States. He thinks like Reilly and outmaneuvers him through the twists and turns of this action-packed novel. Ascendant frantically connects the dots to Markov’s ultimate target and ends up in a game of chicken. The pawn in this endgame is Alexis Truffant, Reilly's love interest from the first novel, and the gamble is breathtaking.
Chapman again delivers a crisp thriller, tapping themes of our times that daily news has made commonplace. And once again he has left it open-ended, teasing us in anticipation of the next novel in series.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2591-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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