An intertwined exploration of love and family loyalty, political ambition and international intrigue.
In his fiction debut, British journalist Naughtie offers a double-twisting spy drama worthy of his countryman le Carré.
It’s an unseasonably warm July in the 1970s. The USSR lurks malevolently. Politicians need a vacation, but Will Flemyng, a minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, faces two dilemmas: An American espionage agent is discovered dead in a House of Commons storeroom; and Flemyng’s older brother, Mungo, has uncovered evidence that their beloved mother had a long-term affair with an American. Once a spy, up-and-comer Flemyng is on the list of possible candidates for the U.S. ambassadorship. The first choice drowned his chance in Courvoisier. There’s another problem. A prominent U.S. senator’s wife has accused someone on the nominee list of raping her years ago. Naughtie lays down an extraordinarily complex narrative, including another thread involving the U.S.’s discovery that someone on its side has been feeding London secret information. It seems even friends have conflicting interests. In this narrative labyrinth, every page seems to chronicle encounters where one character or another schemes to uncover or hide evidence, all the deviousness pronounced in the right accent. Naughtie has an intimate grip on rural Scotland and London, from parks to private clubs, and his characters fit the archetypes you'd expect to find in their stiff-upper-lip, class-strangled political environment, yet in their travails, they become sympathetic. There’s more: A sometimes-estranged third Flemyng brother who chose to take American citizenship has been dispatched to London to help sort out the mess. Naughtie has a gift for colorful phrases—"a winding crocodile of taxis"—and a worldly, perhaps rightfully jaundiced view of the political world he’s covered as a journalist—"The more you concentrate on behaving sensibly in politics—rationally—doing the right thing, moving up, the more the rules of the game are bound to make you behave irrationally."
An intertwined exploration of love and family loyalty, political ambition and international intrigue.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0961-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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