Improbable and sometimes silly, but Rollins spins an entertaining thriller out of a long string of what-ifs.
Inferno with rocket launchers and astrolabes: Rollins (Crucible, 2019, etc.) takes his readers to hell.
You’re making a mistake if you approach a Rollins novel without suspending every ounce of disbelief that you hold. Otherwise, who would swallow a hook baited with the premise that, by way of the ancient Homeric epics, modern jihadists are on the verge of leveraging the supernatural powers of the underworld, following the footsteps of a shadowy cabal, which, as Pope Leo X tells Leonardo da Vinci—yes, that Leonardo da Vinci—once upon a time “found the entrance to Hell”? It’s up to the good guys of Sigma Force, the secret and highly lethal special-ops division of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to save the world from such malign possibilities. As always, Cmdr. Gray Pierce and company perform superhuman feats in the service of truth, justice, and the American way, with some sympathetic and highly capable civilian in tow. In this case, it’s a scholar named Elena Cargill, who, apart from holding “dual PhDs in paleoanthropology and archaeology,” is also the daughter of the chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, making her an attractive target indeed. As we meet her, Elena is working through an archaeological puzzle: How did the Arabian super-dhow that she’s discovered under hundreds of feet of Greenlandic ice get there? It might just have something to do with a clockwork mechanism that steers interested parties toward the flaming depths of Tartarus and its resident demons, titans, metal mastiffs, and their ilk. You’d think it no place to visit, but it’d be handy to have such tools in one’s kit if one were bent on world conquest. So it is that Elena and the DARPAnauts go up against a nefarious band of terrorists, one a James Bond–worthy giant and the other, this being equal-opportunity evil, a smart and ever so ill-tempered woman who “savor[s] the kill to come” and wreaks an awful lot of damage, as supervillains will. Mayhem ensues.
Improbable and sometimes silly, but Rollins spins an entertaining thriller out of a long string of what-ifs.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289291-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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