A private eye/spy protagonist who, like this multi-genre tale, excels at both.
In this thriller, a private investigator and former Royal Marine tries to thwart a terrorist group that is planning a major strike in 1988 London.
A terrorist wave has been making its way through Britain for six months with a series of attacks. When multimillionaire Solomon Goldstein loses his oldest daughter in a nightclub bombing, he hires private investigator George Grant. Grant, after all, has more incentive than the coppers: his lover, Joanne Schaeffer, to whom Grant had planned to propose, also died from injuries sustained in the blast. The detective works with Scotland Yard and later with MI6, which was already monitoring Grant. It appears a Middle Eastern faction, the International Freedom Fighters Council, is orchestrating the terrorist assaults. But Grant’s trip to Egypt to see an expert on Middle Eastern affairs turns sideways, as he eventually winds up in a gunfight and on trial for murder. Grant soon realizes that more than one person is responsible for Joanne’s death. A secret group of individuals using code names, headed by the Tailor (known in the Middle East as The Grim Reaper), appears to be behind everything and includes at least one traitorous government official. With only a few people he can trust, Grant must stop the Scorpion’s Sting, the terrorists’ planned ––and imminent––catastrophe. This gleefully convoluted novel features a bevy of characters and twists; Grant even jokes that he’s perplexed about whom he’s working for. Readers won’t be confused, however, as Ritchie (Sleaze, 2015) maintains a clear, direct narrative, despite its density. Though perhaps he does this a bit too thoroughly; characters constantly updating others repeat certain plot points too often. But the story’s a perpetual sprint, Grant dodging bullets and vicious dogs, with a couple of surprising double crosses. Ritchie grounds his fictional tale with a historical backdrop: Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher makes appearances, as does the newly formed al-Qaida. The exhilarating final act is bolstered by a deadline, with Grant aware of the upcoming date for the London attack. But a detective story also runs throughout, and the book holds off identifying more than one of those unknown baddies until the story’s nearly over.
A private eye/spy protagonist who, like this multi-genre tale, excels at both.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5234-3999-7
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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