A superlative hero headlines this razor-sharp crime tale.
In this thriller, a wealthy American businessman suspected of murder goes on the run with contract killers at his heels.
Joe Savage is one of the richest men in the United States. As CEO of Omnicon Investments, he lives and works in New York City, with homes in various states and a chateau on the French Riviera. Best of all, he and his beautiful wife, Betty, live a happy life with their 4-year-old son, Mark. But this all comes crashing down one day when Joe awakens in a strange apartment with a body in the bedroom. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. Convinced the police won’t buy that, Joe flees the crime scene. New York City Police Department detective Thomas Bone takes the murder case, with plenty of evidence pointing to a certain CEO. It must be a frame-up, but Joe has nowhere to turn for help. Betty and Mark are his only family, and she and Joe’s friend Peter Turnbull, Omnicon’s finance director, insist the entrepreneur turn himself in and take a guilty plea. Joe refuses to cop to something he didn’t do and instead sets out to prove his innocence. As Bone and New York’s finest comb the city, Joe keeps his head down, trying on disguises and even a new identity. But the authorities aren’t the only ones after him. For some reason, professional killers are gunning for him as well, and they tend to shoot first with nary a warning. Joe fights to stay alive and out of handcuffs long enough to clear his name.
Obomeghie’s novel brims with suspense. Though readers know right away who’s responsible for the murder and the motive, the narrative rolls out surprises, including startling deaths and specifics about the hit men. There’s plenty of action, too. Joe gets involved in foot and car chases, most of the time with assassins packing guns and lots of bullets. The author layers the story with painstaking details about Joe’s opulent lifestyle, a glaring contrast to the protagonist’s grim existence on the streets. He trades in his $3,000 Armani suit for a pair of sneakers, and his stay at a cheap hotel with “dusty, papered walls done in floral patterns” is worlds away from his New York home with million-dollar artworks adorning the walls. Joe will surely earn readers’ sympathy, as he suffers from depression and recurring nightmares from his yearlong captivity in a Viet Cong prison in Vietnam. And Joe’s nemesis Bone, though a smart and capable detective, isn’t the easiest guy to like, too often resorting to bloodshed. Despite all the gunfire, the author keeps the story’s violent scenes in check, even spotlighting the unexpected fallout. For example, readers may cheer when Joe successfully evades armed men, but innocent bystanders aren’t so lucky. Most descriptions, meanwhile, sound like snazzy one-liners, from on-the-lam Joe’s “walking around New York with a face he couldn’t afford” to a cigarette-smoking cop’s “presently ignoring the Surgeon General’s warning.” The story culminates in a gratifying denouement chock-full of resolution.
A superlative hero headlines this razor-sharp crime tale.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9913830-1-6
Page Count: 492
Publisher: Elliott and Dylan Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Lots of violent action with little payoff.
Jack Ryan Jr. is back to risk life and limb in saving a teenage girl from international killers while his father, U.S. President Jack Ryan Sr., figures out what to do with Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment facility, hidden in a mine.
Junior, head of the secret intelligence outfit The Campus, which was functionally wiped out in Tom Clancy Flash Point (2023), is heading across Texas to a rendezvous with his fiancee, Lisanne Robertson, a one-armed former Marine and cop. He’s waylaid by the aftermath of a multi-vehicle accident that he discovers resulted from a gun attack that left a driver hanging on for life, and now puts Jack in the crosshairs of the gunmen. A tip leads him to a 4 a.m. meeting with Amanda, a single mom whose impetuous daughter, Bella, has run off with her highly undesirable boyfriend only to be abducted by the baddies. Meanwhile...in the nation’s capital, American surveillance has determined that Iran is on the cusp of nuclear armament. The only way to stop them is unleashing an unpiloted and untested super plane with massive destructive power. The book’s treatment of Iran’s “existential threat to the entire globe” as a subplot is rather curious, to say the least. You keep waiting for Bentley to connect the two stories, but that happens only superficially. Late in the book, we are told as an afterthought that Iran’s immediate threat had been “mitigated.” Unfortunately, there is no mitigation of the novel’s hackneyed prose—"The analytical portion of Jack’s brain couldn’t help but be impressed.”
Lots of violent action with little payoff.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422816
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A worthy addition to an entertaining series.
Danger abounds in the 20th ocean adventure in Cussler’s NUMA Files series.
Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala “find trouble the way a prize bloodhound finds a scent,” and this time they find it in the seas near Nassau. There, the National Underwater and Marine Agency training ship Edison responds to a mayday call from the MV Heron saying that they're under attack. The ship at first appears to be empty, but once the rescuers explore inside, a group of crazed men attacks them. The crazies are victims of Martin Colon, formerly of Cuban Intelligence and now VP of Ostrom Airship Corporation. The guy’s a bad dude with a serious grudge against the United States. He and his henchmen have injected the Heron’s crew with tiny microchips, electromagnetic sensors half the size of an average grain of pollen. If you get jabbed with this, your brain imprints and blindly obeys the first voice you hear. And if you’re told to kill your friends, you’ll kill them if you can. So now that Colon has successfully tested the weapon on individuals, he’s ready to go big time. And what better device for spreading the dust-sized chips in the billions than to disperse them from his luxury airship the Condor? It’s as big as an ocean liner and lifts with helium, so no fair comparing it to the hydrogen-hindered Hindenburg. Imagine a craft larger than the Empire State Building that lands “as soft as a feather.” Indeed, it’s “a world-class ocean liner plowing the skies.” NUMA sends people to inspect the Condor on the pretext that they might want to purchase a similar airship. To put it mildly, exciting action ensues. Can the NUMA crew head off a psyops attack that would cause mass madness and chaos? Though readers can guess the answer, they’ll enjoy seeing the heroes at work in this fast-moving yarn.
A worthy addition to an entertaining series.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593543979
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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