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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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