Another artful Archer telenovela, readable as a stand-alone family drama but more a treat for those captured by the series.
Archer (Mightier Than the Sword, 2015, etc.) has great good fun with the sixth volume of his Clifton Chronicles, this one covering the 1970s; his characters move from peril to peril, mostly financial or political, while occasionally straying into territory where bullets fly.
That’s no worry for Harry Clifton, World War II hero and bestselling author; or Emma, his wife, chief of family-owned Barrington Shipping; or Sebastian, their son and big-time London banker; or Sir Giles Barrington, Emma’s brother and Labour politician. Following a short, thorough synopsis, the Clifton-Barringtons move onto new crises, including Harry’s impassioned effort to free Russian writer Anatoly Babakova (think Pasternak or Solzhenitsyn) from the Soviet gulag. Barrington Shipping stabilized, the once apolitical Emma meets and admires Margaret Thatcher, inspiring cliché—"Emma found the atmosphere in the corridors of power electric." Sir Giles rescues his East German lover, but the relationship is haunted by the ghosts of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean. And the villain who simply won’t go away, Lady Virginia Fenwick, an utterly corrupt schemer once married to Sir Giles, gets her hooks into a Louisiana cannery heir. Grown-up Sebastian—"gone were the rough edges of greed"—copes with a stiff upper lip when his bank’s new owner, Hakim Bishara, is framed, arrested, and tried, a scheme engineered by "The Unholy Trinity," a group of forgettable villains. After a complicated-turned-tragic love affair with a beautiful young Indian woman, Sebastian has opportunity to reconnect with long-lost American love Samantha thanks to the parent-trap machinations of their superprecocious preteen daughter. Archer spins out dialogue that’s spot-on, judging by Downton Abbey or Call the Midwife, and his settings will inspire thoughts about the cost of tickets to London.
Another artful Archer telenovela, readable as a stand-alone family drama but more a treat for those captured by the series.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06162-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
