If Van Lustbader intends for Whitman and Red Rover to be serial players, he should avoid the fog of war and offer more...
Joining the trend of blending a soupçon of fantasy into the action-adventure genre, Van Lustbader (The Bourne Ascendency, 2014, etc.) adds a Louisiana Santeria priest as a role player in a conspiracy against the "blackest of black ops" units, the Red Rover team.
Red Rover is the go-to gang for King Cutler’s Universal Security Associates, a private defense contractor. Greg Whitman is the top gun, and he leads the three-man Red Rover fire-team into Pakistan to find Seiran el-Habib, the bad guy du jour. It’s a trap. One team member dies; Felix Orteño is wounded. Universal Security works mostly for the National Security Agency, which is ripe with internal conflict, most of which originates from Luther St. Vincent, chief of NSA’s Directorate N. St. Vincent also runs the off-the-books Mobius Project, an experimental effort to chemically create "weaponized warriors." With administrative assistants bed-hopping and Whitman relying on a nude pole dancer for friendship, it’s no surprise that both Whitman and St. Vincent are connected to an ageless bayou conjuror named Preach Desmortiers, whose familiar is a crow. These characters collide in a narrative with enough threads to knit a camouflage uniform, especially after Whitman rebuilds Red Rover by adding Charlie Daou, an expert armorer who’s also Whitman’s estranged longtime girlfriend. It doesn’t help that Orteño’s manipulated when St. Vincent rescues his drug-addicted sister. Yes, she too is connected to Preacher. Van Lustbader further complicates this smorgasbord of intrigue and conspiracies, hubris and action by bringing in Illuminati-like behind-the-scenes manipulators called the Alchemists and much Sturm und Drang about the Well, a peculiar place for rendition or disposal of superbad guys.
If Van Lustbader intends for Whitman and Red Rover to be serial players, he should avoid the fog of war and offer more focused narratives.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8551-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The...
Veteran thrillmeister Deaver kicks off a new series about a man who collects rewards for a living.
Don’t call Colter Shaw a private eye, or a freelance investigator, or even a soldier of fortune, though his job includes elements of all three. The son of a cranky survivalist who died years ago amid suspicious circumstances, light-footed Shaw has returned close to his childhood home in the Bay Area in the hope of claiming the $10,000 Frank Mulliner is offering for the return of his daughter, Sophie, a college student who stormed out after the two of them fought over the FOR SALE sign outside his house and hasn’t been seen since. Shaw, who has the cool-headed but irritating habit of calculating the numerical odds on every possibility, thinks there’s a 60 percent chance that Sophie’s dead, “murdered by a serial killer, rapist or a gang wannabe.” Even though he accepts rewards only for rescues, not recoveries, he begins sorting through the scant evidence, quickly gets a hot lead about Sophie’s fate, and just as quickly realizes that Detective Dan Wiley, of the Joint Major Crimes Task Force, should have followed exactly the same clues days ago. (The rapidly shifting relations between Shaw and the law, in fact, are a particular high point here.) The day after Shaw’s search for Sophie comes to a violent end, he’s already, in the time-honored manner of Deaver’s bulldog heroes (The Burial Hour, 2017, etc.), on the trail of a second abduction, that of LGBT activist Henry Thompson. Readers who haven’t skipped the prologue will know that still a third kidnap victim, very pregnant Elizabeth Chabelle, will need to be rescued the following day. Thompson’s grief-stricken partner, Brian Byrd, tells Shaw, “It’s like this guy’s playing some goddamn sick game”—a remark Deaver’s fans will know to give just as much weight as Shaw himself does.
For once Deaver takes more effort to establish his hero’s bona fides than to give him a compelling and logical plot. The results are subpar for this initial installment but more encouraging for the promised series.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53594-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.
A kidnapping survivor–turned-vigilante tries to save another young woman while the police do everything they can to save them both.
Flora Dane might look unscathed but she’s permanently scarred from having been abducted while on spring break in Florida seven years earlier by Jacob Ness, a sadistic trucker who held her captive for 472 days, keeping her in a coffin for much of the time when he wasn't forcing her to have sex with him. Now back in Boston and schooled in self-defense, Flora is obsessed with kidnapped girls and the nature of survival, a topic she touches on a bit more than necessary in the many flashbacks to her time in captivity. Gardner (Crash & Burn, 2015, etc.) must walk a fine line in accurately evoking the horrors of Flora’s past ordeals without slipping into excessive descriptions of violence; she is not entirely successful. When Flora thwarts another kidnapping attempt by killing Devon Goulding, her would-be abductor, Gardner regular Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren’s interest is piqued even though she’s meant to be on restricted duty. Then Flora disappears for real, and Warren, along with Dr. Samuel Keynes, the FBI victim specialist from Flora's original kidnapping, fears it’s related to the kidnapping three months earlier of Stacey Summers, a case Flora followed closely. Gardner alternates between Warren’s investigation into Flora’s disappearance and Flora’s present-day hell at the hands of a new enemy, but the implausibility of the sheer number of kidnappings, among other things, strains credulity.
A gritty, complicated heroine like Flora Dane deserves a better plot than this needlessly complicated story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95457-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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