Mathews, an ex-CIA analyst, informs us that the agency signed off on the manuscript. No secrets, then, though there are...
Mathews (a.k.a. mystery writer Stephanie Barron) returns (after The Cutout, 2001) with a spy thriller extrapolated loosely from perhaps-real events in Southeast Asia.
Stefani Fogg is a corporate superwoman just so bored with the life of riches and comfort. Not to worry: a friend is on hand to offer her training in superheroism/secret agency, and her first assignment is to investigate the goings-on behind Max Roderick’s recent troubles. Max has been in a bit of a spot since a Thai hooker turned up dead in his bed. As it happens, he’s the grandson of Jack Roderick, the famous Silk King and operative who was active in Southeast Asia in mid-century. (Jack is based on the “Legendary American” Jim Thompson, whose disappearance is a real-life mystery.) Max is also an ex-Olympic skier. Even before the mystery develops, he and Stef go on many a romantic run together, falling for each other just as people start to try to kill them. The investigations they undertake of one another threaten paradise, but all is resolved before Max nearly kills himself—skiing. Of course, it’s sabotage, but now he’s a quadriplegic. Though he might heal. Some do. But then suddenly he’s dead, having rolled his wheelchair to oblivion. As an added complication, his will had just been altered to leave everything to you-know-who. But was it really suicide? As Stef dips into mystery in exotic locales, so do we go back to Max’s grandfather’s life to see how all this got started. From there, it’s three pages of explanation for every page of action. Back in real time, Knetsch, Max’s evil lawyer, is indeed acting evil, but is he the real madman behind Max’s “accident?” It hardly matters: Stef the industrialist turned secret agent is finally having some fun.
Mathews, an ex-CIA analyst, informs us that the agency signed off on the manuscript. No secrets, then, though there are competent thrills.Pub Date: June 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-10913-8
Page Count: 405
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
Although the prose sounds like Sandford, the plotting is a letdown: The trail to the last act is rich in incident, but not...
Sandford, who seems determined to keep Lucas Davenport’s latest cases secret, allows him to be upstaged once more by his junior colleague Virgil Flowers, though this time there’s no great honor in star billing.
The Stillwater police call Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) to the veterans’ memorial where the body of building inspector Bobby Sanderson has been deposited. He was shot twice with a .22 and found with a section of lemon in his mouth—all details that echo the recent death of title searcher Chuck Utecht in New Ulm. The two murders are clearly the work of the same killer, but who is he, and why has he taken such ritualistic care to incriminate himself by emphasizing the similarities between two crimes that ordinarily wouldn’t have been connected? More to the point, are these two crimes only the beginning? For readers new to this sort of fiction, Sandford helpfully provides brief conversations indicating that Chippewa Indian Ray Bunton and ex-cop John Wigge, a VP at a private security agency, had better watch their backs as well. Prompted by Lucas and driven night after sleepless night to assemble the facts, Virgil (Dark of the Moon, 2007, etc.) learns at length that all the targets on the kill list served together in Vietnam, where they shared a secret worth killing for nearly 40 years later. The suspects include Ralph Warren, Wigge’s sinister boss at that security firm; Professor Mead Sinclair, a lefty researcher on the Vietnam War who just might be in bed with the CIA; his half-Vietnamese daughter Mai, who makes her extracurricular interest in Virgil plain from the get-go.
Although the prose sounds like Sandford, the plotting is a letdown: The trail to the last act is rich in incident, but not original, urgent or compelling. On the other hand, the very last surprise, climaxing a turf war between the BCA and the Department of Homeland Security, is a honey.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15527-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.
A sequel to The Peripheral (2014), in which bored dilettantes from the future meddle virtually with potential pasts while more responsible people try to ameliorate the damage.
The novel opens, as so many Gibson novels do, with an intelligent, creative young woman accepting a not terribly well-defined job from an enigmatic (possibly sinister) executive involving a piece of cutting-edge technology. In this case, that technology is an emerging AI with origins in top-secret military research who calls herself Eunice. The young woman, Verity Jane, spends only a couple of days with Eunice (via company-issued glasses, phone, and headset) before her new boss, Gavin, gets nervous about Eunice’s potential and starts attempting to monitor every move of the human–AI pair. What Verity does not know is that her present day of 2017, in which a decreased Russian influence on social media led to an unnamed woman who is clearly Hillary Clinton winning the presidency, the U.K. voting to remain in the E.U., and a volatile situation in Turkey threatening to turn nuclear, was deliberately manipulated by someone in 2136 who enjoys creating doomsday scenarios among possible past timelines. It’s up to future law enforcement (who can only contact the timeline via digital communication or virtually controlled mechanical peripherals) to get in touch with Verity and Eunice and recruit them to prevent looming global catastrophe. Given Gibson’s Twitter-stated unhappiness with the timeline in which he currently finds himself, it's hard to know what he's implying here: That outside intervention would have been required to achieve a Hillary Clinton presidency and defeat Brexit? Or that our own vigilance on social media could/should have brought those outcomes about? And why would these two potentially positive occurrences in that timeline instigate an even darker scenario than the one readers are currently experiencing—and also require that intervention to fix it? Have we reached the point of no return in all potential 21st-century timelines, doomed, at least in part, regardless of what political and social choices we make now? (Nor is it ever really explained why Gavin turns so quickly on Verity and Eunice, unless it’s simply to inject the story with urgency and transform it into the author’s favorite plot device, the chase.) This is vintage, or possibly tired, Gibson, filling his usual quest-driven template with updated contemporary or just-past-contemporary politics, technology, and culture.
Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-101-98693-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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