Hurwitz adds to his string of imaginative thrillers with an action-adventure story ready for blockbuster Hollywood—get...
Hurwitz (Tell No Lies, 2013, etc.) again proves himself a plot master as he follows Eve Hardaway on a much-needed vacation into Mexico’s Oaxacan jungles.
It was supposed to be an anniversary trip. Then Eve’s husband found a younger, more "elegant" woman. Eve decided the prepaid getaway to Días Felices Ecolodge was just the ticket anyway, especially after having given up nursing for a mind-numbing corporate cubicle to support her son. At the lodge, Eve stumbles upon a lost digital camera while on a jungle trek and later learns that it belongs to Theresa Hamilton, now missing. On the same trek, Eve spies a mysterious man near a ramshackle hut secreted in the dense foliage. After deftly creating empathy for Eve, Hurwitz drops her into live-or-die circumstances, buoyed only by her shaky but ever growing self-confidence and love for her son. The mystery jungle dweller is slowly revealed to be Bashir Ahmat al-Gilani, the Bear of Bajaur, a bloodthirsty terrorist hiding in Mexico and a character written with inventive back story. If Días Felices is a jungle Ship of Fools, characters run to type: macho "Gay Jay," healing after a bad romance; Will, his straight best friend, the McGyver that Eve needs; Claire, a lonely, bitter and vocal young woman handicapped by leg braces; Harry and Sue, an older couple more interested in personal safety than group survival; and jungle-wise Fortunato, indígenio lodge cook. In a plot as fast as river rapids, Eve fights more battles than Rambo and copes with intermittent Internet connections, a satellite phone that only occasionally gets a signal, gangrene, dysentery, disembowelment by IED and a "black wave" of "eat-everything-in-their-path" sweeper ants. Hurwitz relates Oaxaca imaginatively, with a villain who reminds a soccer mom that "jungle laws had always run beneath it all, a molten stream under the bedrock."
Hurwitz adds to his string of imaginative thrillers with an action-adventure story ready for blockbuster Hollywood—get Cameron Diaz’s people!Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-62683-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.
A historical novel explores the intersection of love and war in the life of Australian-born World War II heroine Nancy Grace Augusta Wake.
Lawhon’s (I Was Anastasia, 2018, etc.) carefully researched, lively historical novels tend to be founded on a strategic chronological gambit, whether it’s the suspenseful countdown to the landing of the Hindenberg or the tale of a Romanov princess told backward and forward at once. In her fourth novel, she splits the story of the amazing Nancy Wake, woman of many aliases, into two interwoven strands, both told in first-person present. One begins on Feb. 29th, 1944, when Wake, code-named Hélène by the British Special Operations Executive, parachutes into Vichy-controlled France to aid the troops of the Resistance, working with comrades “Hubert” and “Denden”—two of many vividly drawn supporting characters. “I wake just before dawn with a full bladder and the uncomfortable realization that I am surrounded on all sides by two hundred sex-starved Frenchmen,” she says. The second strand starts eight years earlier in Paris, where Wake is launching a career as a freelance journalist, covering early stories of the Nazi rise and learning to drink with the hardcore journos, her purse-pooch Picon in her lap. Though she claims the dog “will be the great love of [her] life,” she is about to meet the hunky Marseille-based industrialist Henri Fiocca, whose dashing courtship involves French 75 cocktails, unexpected appearances, and a drawn-out seduction. As always when going into battle, even the ones with guns and grenades, Nancy says “I wear my favorite armor…red lipstick.” Both strands offer plenty of fireworks and heroism as they converge to explain all. The author begs forgiveness in an informative afterword for all the drinking and swearing. Hey! No apologies necessary!
A compulsively readable account of a little-known yet extraordinary historical figure—Lawhon’s best book to date.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54468-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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