by Eric Jordan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2012
An engaging technological thriller.
In Jordan’s (Operation Hebron, 2000) thriller sequel, an ex-CIA agent, now an information technology billionaire, devises a cunning plan to disrupt both Iran’s burgeoning nuclear threat and the world drug trade.
Jordan’s first novel introduced the seductive and dangerous assassin Jackie Marcovic. Here, Jackie gets a new name—Erika Wolff—and an altered appearance, made possible by her new client, Rick Sterling, the president of a global IT cryptography firm. Rick has been running a shadow crusade against the global drug trade ever since a heroin dealer murdered his wife 10 years ago. Now, he needs Erika’s services to help take down targets in the Italian Mafia. (Why not, say, the Colombians? “Because the Mafia…still has long tentacles,” he says.) When Rick learns of a CIA plan to destabilize Iran—which protects a significant heroin-transport route—he decides to kill two birds with one stone, setting the Mafia against Iran and letting them take each other down. His plan, when set into action, is dangerous, clandestine and exciting. In many ways, this thriller is an Iron Man–like fantasy of the good that wealth, power and smarts can accomplish. It’s also spiced up with sex and expensive high-tech toys, such as Rick’s nuclear-powered yacht, with “the latest in sea and space navigation, intercept technology, and satellite communications with considerable cyber war capabilities”; aboard, one can “catch a satellite movie…or work out in a state-of-the-art gym, go island-hopping on a Fountain speedboat…or even board a helicopter or small jet seaplane with folding wings for a little sightseeing.” Readers may find the story’s slickness a bit cheesy at times, with its referencing of brand names, such as Armani, and its recurring focus on (mostly female) pulchritude. They may also feel the neatness of the plot’s conclusion somewhat unlikely. However, the author’s high-level background in intelligence brings an air of realism to this novel and grounds it in satisfying details.
An engaging technological thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0755214990
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Bright Pen
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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