A third case—make that flock of cases—for Colter Shaw, who finds lost people for the reward money.
Soon after Shaw finds evidence that, shortly before his death years ago, his father, Ashton, had been on the trail of some kind of damning information the late BlackBridge Corporate Solutions researcher Amos Gahl had gotten on his employer, his long-estranged brother, Russell Shaw, interrupts his own clandestine undercover work and turns up to help Shaw find that information and bring down BlackBridge. Their enemies—BlackBridge founder and CEO Ian Helms, his fixer Ebbitt Droon, grandmotherly killer Irena Braxton, and all the company’s vast resources—are potent, but not nearly as potent as the array of switchbacks Shaw and his brother will have to negotiate as they search for the mysterious Endgame Sanction of 1906. The company’s deep-laid malfeasance is closely entangled with the schemes of BlackBridge client Jonathan Stuart Devereux, head of Banyan Tree Holdings. Along the way, Shaw finds evidence that the family of someone identified only as “SP” is slated for extermination and adds saving them to his to-do list. And undeterred by the firepower arrayed against him, he decides to take on the more traditional job of finding recovering addict Tessy Vasquez for the piddling reward her mother, undocumented, overworked Maria Vasquez, is offering, and his search naturally gets tangled up with everything else. The caseload is every bit as miscellaneous as it sounds, but Deaver spices his kitchen sink with so many red herrings, misleading clues, bait-and-switches, and double-fakes that you’ll be hard-pressed to identify that final twist.
Enough surprises, complications, and deceptions for three novels and half a dozen short stories.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-53913-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Categories: THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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With the United States the “closest [it’s] been to war” in a lifetime, intelligence operative Jack Ryan Jr. faces stiff odds in trying to avert disaster with China.
Trouble with China begins brewing (yet again in the Clancy books) with the rendition of a Chinese scientist and the killing of his American brother, a specialist in machine learning. With a sniper attack on the German outpost of The Campus, Ryan’s “off-the-books” agency, and the downing of an American plane over the South China Sea, U.S. efforts to recover a Chinese undersea glider capable of detecting a $3 billion American stealth submarine are in jeopardy. Things look especially grim with the capture of crash survivor John Clark, Ryan’s boss and a close compadre of his father, President Jack Ryan Sr. With Ryan Sr. still shaken by the abduction of his wife a year ago and Ryan Jr. doubtful of his abilities as a team leader, it's up to intelligence director Mary Pat Foley to calm the waters with her expertise and strong will. One possible outcome is a Chinese attack on Taiwan. In Bentley’s third outing in the series, it takes a while to get past cookie cutter stuff: Many pages go by before the reader knows what all the tense language, chase scenes, and international travel are about. But the book's cool, checkerboard efficiency eventually takes hold. And the streaks of vulnerability that run through the Ryans impart a human dimension that most such thrillers lack. Bentley also takes pains to distinguish the novel from fake fiction: “Unlike in the movies, getting struck by a rifle round moving at several thousand feet per second was not insignificant.”
A well-turned, if predictable, installment in the popular series.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422786
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | POLITICAL, MILITARY & TERRORISM
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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