by Eric Van Lustbader ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 2012
Fans will appreciate this installment. Lustbader newbies should start with the first in the series.
Readers unfamiliar with Lustbader’s (Blood Trust, 2011, etc.) Jack McClure action series might want to keep a pencil handy when diving into this book.
Arlen Crawford is the U.S. president. Alli Carson, the previous president’s daughter fresh from being rescued by McClure, is training at “Fearington, one of the prime secret service training centers.” The deceased president’s older brother, crooked business tycoon Henry Holt Carson, has Crawford knotted up in corruption. And there’s a shadowy general and a black project by the code name of Three-thirteen. McClure himself is bedded down in Moscow with his lover, Annika Batchuk, granddaughter of the grand old criminal Dyadya Gourdjiev. All that is intertwined with the descendants of the Norn, a group of once-Nazis co-opted by World War II’s famed OSS undercover organization. Werner von Verschuer is the current Dr. Evil, being the bastard offspring of Josef Mengele and the daughter of the founder of the Nazi Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Add a Middle Eastern criminal mastermind called “the Syrian,” experiments with twins and a “security company” called International Perimeter, and new readers will need a scorecard. The action kicks off with a purple prose prologue in which an assassin attempts to murder McClure and Annika. Next comes the incessant scene-hopping, character-shifting narrative flow that’s a thriller staple. Enough back story develops a quarter into the novel to give readers some insight into the book’s two narratives. The first involves a mysterious cabal of powerful Americans conspiring to take advantage of the Arab Spring uprisings to secure control of the Suez Canal and Middle Eastern oil production. The second involves sneaking Gourdiev out of Russia to escape murder by Grigori Batchuk, the rogue second-wife offspring of his former son-in-law and thus Annika’s half brother. With strobe-flash scenes and action-clichéd dialogue occasionally spiced by keen wordplay, Lustbader powers through with plentiful hand-to-hand martial arts combat described blow by blow.
Fans will appreciate this installment. Lustbader newbies should start with the first in the series.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3339-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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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by Kathy Reichs
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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