A compelling romantic thriller with appealing characters.
While running from his dangerous past, a man stumbles into his oldest crush’s hometown in Jolie’s novel.
Erik Lai is a professional hacker who changed his last name to Yeung as a protective measure. After deciding to separate from Spectre, a crime syndicate, he and his team (Wolf, Trevor, and Kairi) have been hunted by assassins. During the killers’ last attempt on their lives, they murdered Kairi’s fiance and forced the team to go deep into hiding. Erik’s company monitors the dark web for threats for the United States government and other organizations, so luckily for him and his team, they can do their work remotely. To help Kairi feel safe, they go back to the Napa Valley town where she grew up. Once there, Erik tracks Firefly, aka Vivi, an old gamer friend he’s never met in person, and discovers that she’s the owner of a small local bookstore. He doesn’t immediately tell her who he really is because he doesn’t want her to know that he tracked her IP address, which inevitably breaks an old promise they made to stay anonymous forever. In the process of getting to know Vivi, Erik finds himself struggling to decide whether he should stay with her or go back into hiding. Jolie gives the novel a strong start with a description of an assassin attempting to break into Erik’s home, which adds validity to the characters’ constant concerns about being attacked again. Jolie’s action scenes, suspense, and engaging plot developments make it easy for readers to put themselves in Erik’s shoes. Similarly, her talent for character development, as when Vivi banters with her grandfather and siblings, adds further depth and helps to build a cast of likable characters—even when Erik lacks a certain amount of social intelligence, as when he doesn’t understand why tracking someone’s IP address might be seen as intrusive.
A compelling romantic thriller with appealing characters.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Noctivity
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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