Mathews writes well, keeps the pace brisk and has great fun re-creating historical personages.
If the title sounds reminiscent of a James Bond novel, it’s no coincidence, for Mathews freely makes use of Ian Fleming’s World War II experience as an intelligence officer in Cairo and Tehran to create adventures in espionage and counterespionage.
A brief prologue establishes some significant facts about Fleming’s early life—that his father died a hero in the Great War, for example, and that his mother was far fonder of Ian’s brother, Peter. At an elite English prep school, Ian befriends American Michael Hudson and establishes the “Too Bad Club,” supposedly for those who are too bad to die. Skip ahead 26 years. Fleming has re-established his friendship with Hudson, and they’re both stationed in Cairo. Hudson’s job is vague but has something to do with Lend-Lease, while Fleming is involved in tracking down a spy known only as the Fencer, who’s in league with another spy called the Kitten. Mathews weaves a substantial and intricate tale involving an abundance of historical characters, including Stalin (crude), Churchill (wary) and Roosevelt (nervous), who are attending the Cairo and Tehran conferences in late November and early December 1943. Even more prominent in the action are Churchill’s wild daughter-in-law Pamela Digby Churchill—already involved with both Averell Harriman and Edward R. Murrow—Chiang Kai-shek and his cynical but commanding wife, May-Ling, and Alan Turing, the eccentric but brilliant scientist working on the Enigma machine to decode Nazi transmissions. Fleming lays the groundwork for his later success as a novelist by taking on the name—and to some extent, the persona—of James Bond, for he begins to introduce himself in this sly and suave way, and his adventures become increasingly dangerous the closer he gets to the Fencer.
Mathews writes well, keeps the pace brisk and has great fun re-creating historical personages.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-179-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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