A mostly lightweight actioner that’s harmed by clumsy tonal shifts.
A sword-wielding warrior encounters action and intrigue in a cocaine-fueled criminal underworld in this thriller.
New Yorker Lin Su Yoshimura, the half-Chinese, half-Japanese daughter of a Shaolin warrior, is a modern-day samurai, proficient with such weapons as swords, throwing stars, and nunchaku; she can even rip the heart from a man’s chest. When her drug-kingpin boss, Matthew King, is released from prison, he and Lin Su are approached by a dishonorably discharged Special Forces ranger named Jason Stone. He has a bold plan to rob one of the biggest cocaine producers in Mexico, the cutthroat Juan Ramirez, and needs King’s backing to finance the team of military specialists he needs to pull off the heist. The cocaine involved is almost 99% pure, and the money to be gained from stealing five tons of it will make all parties involved very wealthy. It turns out that the caper itself is the easy part of the plan, as the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Mafia, a Muslim community leader, and a vengeful Ramirez all make moves to stop King and Stone from profiting off their ill-gotten wares. The action in Walker’s debut is fast and furious, complete with decapitations, explosions, black Apache helicopters, and, front and center, the deadly Lin Su, swinging katanas and throwing smoke bombs. A countdown to the big drug heist builds real suspense, and some action movie–style one-liners will provoke chuckles, as when Lin Su tells an enemy, “I did not descend from heaven…I came up from hell.” A few character moments are overly melodramatic, though, as when King drops to his knees and screams “NOOOOO!” upon another’s death. When the story attempts to delve into Lin Su’s origins, it uncomfortably and problematically depicts human trafficking, rape, torture, and drug addiction with the same heightened language it uses for fight scenes and shootouts; Lin Su’s rapist, for example is described as using his “penis as a weapon conquering her virginity.”
A mostly lightweight actioner that’s harmed by clumsy tonal shifts.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Groove Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2024
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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