Not knowing who’s listening puts a nation on edge in this engrossing, provocative nail-biter.
A detective investigates a murder and a scary surveillance system in this thriller.
As in previous novels by Crutchley, including Procession(2019), this work set in the near future features an average person who gets drawn into a bizarre situation. The Iliba surveillance system tracks the activities of British citizens through a wrist monitor, with only the elite, such as government leaders, the military, and the police, “Exempt.” Detective Inspector Hubert Plon, an expatriate Frenchman, is one of the Exempt. That starts to change when Plon is assigned to look into a brutal murder. The victim, Adam Weaver, was developing a secret program to use Iliba data to predict people’s future behaviors. Plon locates and copies Weaver’s research. What Plon doesn’t know is that, despite being an Exempt, he too is under surveillance, as his new girlfriend, Freddie Phillips, has been assigned by Defense Intelligence to watch him. He refuses to close the Weaver case as ordered and gets fired as a result, being forced to become one of the Non-Exempt. Plon keeps studying Weaver’s program, but, after an attempt on his life, he and Freddie, who reveals her true identity, go on the run. They discover who is behind the attempt to steal Weaver’s work and seek to spread the word. Crutchley succeeds with this thought-provoking cautionary tale despite not having a particularly likable protagonist. Plon (whom his hated superior Hawley dubs “Plod”) is an earnest, methodical loner who is too arrogant. But he is accomplished at his job, so he gets away with that approach until he crosses the wrong people. His stolid sincerity is enough to get Freddie to flip sides and become an outlaw with him. The author gives a glimpse of what surveillance can become if society isn’t judicious with its use, as Plon is regularly thwarted by those monitoring his “wristpiece.” His journey also enables readers to experience the diversity of the British public. What results is a thrill ride pitting one lone, well-meaning couple against the country’s power-grabbing elite.
Not knowing who’s listening puts a nation on edge in this engrossing, provocative nail-biter.Pub Date: July 26, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-54399-872-4
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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
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