An entertaining mystery with a vibrant setting.
A diplomat barely has time to unpack in a beautiful Mexican city when she finds herself involved in what looks like a high-profile kidnapping in this novel.
Amanda Pennyworth has arrived in Puerto Vallarta to take charge of the American Consular Service, her fourth posting. She is already becoming disenchanted with her career, but Puerto Vallarta should be a safe and pleasant place to spend a few years. There is a large American expatriate community with a literary bent, an attraction because Amanda has been working desultorily on a novel over the years. The star of that community is Joshua Talbot, whose first novel, many years ago, rocked the literary establishment on its heels, but—old story—he has not produced much since. That debut novel was a lodestar in Amanda’s childhood, and now Talbot has shown an interest in her, befriended her. Then, when he is supposed to meet her for dinner, he doesn’t show up. Hours turn into days, and the fear grows that he is hurt somewhere in the mountains backing the town or, worse, has been kidnapped. Sure enough, ransom notes show up on Amanda’s doorstep. Her best ally is Romero Morelos of the Tourist Police, a very solid guy (and single and sort of hunky). Will Amanda and Romero be able to save Talbot? Gilbert is an experienced and capable writer, and Amanda is a well-drawn and intriguing character. Readers will get a keen sense of the daily (and nightly) life in the Zona Romantica (a real area in Puerto Vallarta) and of the undercurrents of Mexican politics, especially the uneasy and unequal relationship between the local police and the arrogant federales. While not in Hammett’s or Chandler’s league, this enjoyable tale delivers the requisite red herrings while following the trail of the crime. But in the end, one of those herrings turns out not to be red at all. Who knew? Well, some readers will probably figure that out and even guess a key angle. The final plot twist has in fact appeared more than once in real life.
An entertaining mystery with a vibrant setting.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68114-521-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Anaphora Literary Press
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A female-forward thriller that makes a strong case that smart, unflinching women should run the world.
Letty Davenport seeks to infiltrate a group of freelance hackers in order to thwart their next project—or maybe to help it along.
Ordinary People, an anti-MAGA cabal of lefties, has already pulled off a string of small-scale disruptions, and the word from the CIA is that they plan to take down the power in the Twin Cities, where Letty grew up. Sen. Christopher Colles, the unofficial boss who’s been impressed by Letty’s unflappable skills with weaponry, wants her to pose as the girlfriend of National Security Agency computer specialist Rod Baxter as he seeks to hook up with Ordinary People across the country in California. After their first attempt goes spectacularly wrong, their forces are beefed up by CIA operative Barbara Cartwright and Department of Homeland Security investigator John Kaiser, who worked with Letty in The Investigator (2022), and they succeed in getting close to Craig Sovern, a prominent Ordinary Person who’s already been wreaking havoc on a number of railroad trains and plans to go bigger and bolder. And these aren’t just any trains. Realizing that Ordinary People’s attacks on the hate-fueled social media platform SlapBack may be a sign that their larger operations are providing an important service to the cause of world peace, Letty and her peeps switch from trying to bring down the organization to trying to protect it from the likes of Russian agent Arseny Stepashin and his trusted contractor Tom Boyadjian—all while keeping everything hush-hush. Yeah, right. Sandford alternates brisk action sequences with a steady stream of revelations that make equivocal players and their ambiguous relations even more complicated.
A female-forward thriller that makes a strong case that smart, unflinching women should run the world.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422410
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A game effort at a tough theme.
The Singularity may become the new ultimate weapon in the aftermath of a nuclear debacle.
If the page-and-a-half prologue doesn’t stop the reader cold, nothing will. It begins: “If a beam of light / energy / open + / close— / reopen == / repeat / stop...” Stop, indeed. This will prompt only the geekiest among us to move on to Chapter 1. But do turn the page. In 2054, the U.S. is in turmoil. Two decades earlier, China nuked San Diego and Galveston while the U.S. inflicted the same on Shanghai and Shenzhen. In the aftermath, the two countries no longer dominate the world, and traditional U.S. political parties are no more. The current action begins when the physically fit President Ángel Castro collapses while giving a speech, prompting “malicious rumors that the president had suffered some sort of health crisis.” He had, and he dies. Of course, there are profound suspicions over his sudden demise. Was the president’s aorta inflamed by a sequence of computer code, à la the prologue? Is he a victim of “remote gene editing” by an unknown entity? Hence the inklings of the 21st century’s new existential threat, a race to achieve the Singularity, where—to oversimplify—technology and humanity become one. The cast includes some holdovers from the authors’ last book, 2034, including Dr. Sandy Chowdhury and Julia Hunt, a woman born in China with allegiance to the U.S. But key is the elusive (and nonfictional) Dr. Ray Kurzweil, thought to be living in Brazil. Meanwhile, American society threatens to explode into civil war between Dreamers and Truthers. But if the ultimate threat to humanity is the Singularity, it doesn’t come through convincingly on these pages. In 2034, the stakes were brutally clear, with millions of lives on the line. Two decades hence, they’re mushier—serious to be sure, but tougher to wrap up into a thriller. With apologies to T. S. Eliot: This is the way the book ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
A game effort at a tough theme.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489864
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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