Vibrant characters and prose carry this enthralling crime tale.
A married couple’s Caribbean vacation is actually a cover for a sex-trafficking sting in this thriller sequel.
Homebody Mariah Bennett is perfectly content with her Jersey Shore life. But her husband, Trey, formerly a Special Forces operative, is bored with his job at a building company. So she reluctantly agrees to his working undercover for Law and International Freedom Enterprise to take down child traffickers. They rent a home on Antillia, an island dense with forests and mountains, where some kids have disappeared. The investigation has a starting point—an American-owned resort that may be a front for sex slavery. While Mariah worries about Trey’s safety, she also frets over his increasing closeness to a sex worker named Camille. This woman hopefully has information that will uncover hard evidence, but is there anything more to her relationship with Trey? In the meantime, Mariah helps a local teacher with kids and picks up details on her own. Once she starts piecing together clues, she finds herself running into unsavory types who don’t take kindly to her nosiness. Miani’s story moves at a deliberate pace. Mariah, who narrates, grumbles over a grueling mountain hike and revels in Thanksgiving bringing her family together again. But tension slowly builds as the investigation takes over the narrative. Mariah, for example, witnesses a probable abduction and soon suspects several people of playing a part in the disappearances, including islanders she has befriended. The author paints beautiful scenery, from rolling, ominous storm clouds to the juxtaposed, multicolored roofs of a town’s many houses. Although the undercover gig unfolds largely in the background, Mariah’s family is endlessly engaging. Her newlywed daughter’s honeymoon was on Antillia, where Mariah’s new son-in-law also works for LIFE. They make up an intriguing cast that deserves another installment or two.
Vibrant characters and prose carry this enthralling crime tale.Pub Date: June 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-141987-8
Page Count: 313
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.
Evildoers plan attacks from America to India, and Jack Ryan Jr. is a prime target.
In Washington state, a man and his family are murdered, and President Jack Ryan learns it is another Poseidon Spear incident. Three retired members of that counterterrorism group have been killed now, and the U.S. government suspects a mole in its midst. Meanwhile, the Umayyad Revolutionary Council believes it has a holy and wholly anti-American mission. Against this backdrop, Jack Ryan Jr., and his fiancée, Lisanne Robertson, visit Delhi, India, to attend the wedding of Srini Rai, the brilliant surgeon who attached Lisanne’s prosthetic left arm. Lisanne had lost her arm in Tom Clancy Shadow of the Dragon (2020). Jack and Lisanne are both operators working for the Campus, a covert group that executes secret presidential directives. A wedding is a happy occasion, and the engaged American couple intend the trip as a vacation. Jack and Lisanne will attend a sangeet, an elaborate pre-wedding party. But it isn’t long before they survive a suicide bomb attack. As with all Clancy novels, there’s plenty of action on a global scale. In simultaneous strikes, terrorists plan to contaminate America’s Western water supply with radioactive waste from Washington’s Hanford nuclear power plant, blow up a spectacular new bridge in Kashmir, and kill the evil Ryan—or Junior, at least. It will be At-Takwir, the end of days. There is an appealing mix of Indian culture, high-speed action, and the rich lode of details that characterizes the whole series. And in the background lingers the question on several characters’ minds: Have Jack and Lisanne set their own wedding date?
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718032
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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