A diverting thriller with thoughtful commentary on a timely issue.
A bank-fraud analyst’s life is upended when she takes on a human trafficking ring in Scott’s topical religious thriller.
The boldest thing about Jesse Jonsen, the principal fraud analyst for Minneapolis-based Uncle Sam Bank,isn’t the fact that she wears jeans in the boardroom, but rather the ingenuity of her pitch to use analysis of credit card purchases to locate human traffickers and apprehend them during the upcoming Super Bowl in Minneapolis. When her bureaucratic bosses turn her down, she retreats to her favorite coffee shop, where she first meets Leilani, a young sex worker with an abusive boyfriend. Jesse’s lingering guilt about her past as a prolific shoplifter and purveyor of fake IDs—the latter of which led to a friend’s death—makes her determined to pursue her plan to bring sex traffickers to justice on the nearby campus of North Prairie University. There, groomers force “work-study associates” into sex work at northern Minnesota resorts frequented by police, congressmen, and other powerful people; among those groomers is Jesse’s boss, the senior vice president of operations at Uncle Sam Bank, who frames her for fraud. Scott’s novel opens with the discovery of a dead body in the Mississippi River—a pitch-perfect beginning for any thriller—and keeps the intrigue coming in briskly paced, short chapters that reflect its protagonist’s no-nonsense style; they also highlight her tendency to attract dangerous elements, whether she’s actively looking for pimps or just working at Dairy Queen.Tense action scenes and courtroom intrigue are coupled with Christian messaging that ramps up near the book’s end, focused primarily on the Sermon on the Mount. However, even non-Christian readers will find the novel noteworthy for its realistic, though never graphic, depiction of the dark world of human trafficking; these scenes, the author notes, are largely drawn from his own interviews with a former gang leader, pimp, and drug dealer. Fans of Scott’s previous novels will be treated to a cameo by world-saving IT guy Jerry Barkley, which subtly suggests a fictional thriller-verse.
A diverting thriller with thoughtful commentary on a timely issue.Pub Date: March 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781962168656
Page Count: 423
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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