Brass-knuckled international intrigue for readers who still pine for the world of James Bond.
A routine exercise in the Bering Strait tips Alaska State Trooper Rake Ozenna off to yet another overscaled global threat, and it’s a honey.
One minute Rake and his buddy Mikki Wekstatt are patrolling the waters in preparation for guiding a Russian speedboat crossing the border between Little Diomede (the American island) and Big Diomede (the Russian one); the next they’re dodging bullets as they fish a mortally wounded woman from the icy waters. Katia Codic dies before they can get any useful information out of her apart from a warning of danger, but that warning is focused much more sharply by the high-casualty prison breakout of Col. Ruslan Yumatov, the wily antagonist from the Zaslon protection unit last seen in Man on Edge (2020). From the clouds of intrigue swirling around Yumatov, Dresden businessman Gavril Nevrosky, British Foreign Secretary Baroness Stephanie Lucas, and nuclear physicist Dr. Rudolf Wagner, a grandly inventive pattern gradually emerges whose goal is to bring the European Union’s common defense project to a shuddering halt. As whiz-kid Stephen Case of Future Forecasting works every angle to get inside the communications and security network of the dark powers who grabbed Yumatov out from under the Americans’ less-than-watchful eyes before the clock ticks down toward Armageddon, the best hope of Rake and his allies seems to depend on preventing his wife, professor Anna Yumatov, and the two small children Yumatov hasn’t seen since his arrest from joining him—or, if all else fails, weaponizing them.
Brass-knuckled international intrigue for readers who still pine for the world of James Bond.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9034-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Lots of violent action with little payoff.
Jack Ryan Jr. is back to risk life and limb in saving a teenage girl from international killers while his father, U.S. President Jack Ryan Sr., figures out what to do with Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment facility, hidden in a mine.
Junior, head of the secret intelligence outfit The Campus, which was functionally wiped out in Tom Clancy Flash Point (2023), is heading across Texas to a rendezvous with his fiancee, Lisanne Robertson, a one-armed former Marine and cop. He’s waylaid by the aftermath of a multi-vehicle accident that he discovers resulted from a gun attack that left a driver hanging on for life, and now puts Jack in the crosshairs of the gunmen. A tip leads him to a 4 a.m. meeting with Amanda, a single mom whose impetuous daughter, Bella, has run off with her highly undesirable boyfriend only to be abducted by the baddies. Meanwhile...in the nation’s capital, American surveillance has determined that Iran is on the cusp of nuclear armament. The only way to stop them is unleashing an unpiloted and untested super plane with massive destructive power. The book’s treatment of Iran’s “existential threat to the entire globe” as a subplot is rather curious, to say the least. You keep waiting for Bentley to connect the two stories, but that happens only superficially. Late in the book, we are told as an afterthought that Iran’s immediate threat had been “mitigated.” Unfortunately, there is no mitigation of the novel’s hackneyed prose—"The analytical portion of Jack’s brain couldn’t help but be impressed.”
Lots of violent action with little payoff.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422816
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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