A refreshing but too-brief turn on the international thriller—with better prose, but no more credibility than Ludlum.
Siler’s fourth tries for Robert Ludlum intrigue and almost beats the plot twister at his own game.
Ludlum didn’t invent the action-hero-with-amnesia-and-a-buried-past opener, but he made it his own. Siler, known for her cool, street-smart, wonderfully vulnerable action heroines (Shot, 2002, etc.), gives the tired device a fresh start when a young American woman named Eve returns to the French convent where she was found a year earlier—alive, with a scar revealing she’d had a child, a bullet hole in her skull that had wiped out her memory. She finds now that all but one of the nuns have been murdered, and it’s clear that the killer was also looking for her. Eve gathers the few belongings she’d had when she was found, including an odd ticket stub from a ferry to Morocco. She assumes the identity of one of the nuns and heads for Tangier to dig up her past. Along the way, she discourses on the current medical lore about amnesia, makes the requisite sardonic comments about tourists and local architecture, recovers a handgun and backpack stuffed with old passports and cash, and finds herself getting long looks from far too many characters. When she’s set up for a robbery and a suspiciously friendly Japanese expatriate winds up dead, she wonders whether she can trust Brian Haverman, the rugged, cagey young drifter who claims to be the brother of a dead man Eve is beginning to remember. She ditches Brian when she finds he’s being less than honest and heads for Marrakech in search of German arms dealer Bruns Werner. Werner’s thugs pump her with memory enhancing drugs, but it’s a picture on the wall that gets her: Werner had some kind of relationship with Eve’s mother! The story loses its way amid too much villainous complication and a sudden ending that doesn’t quite tie up. But it’s a fun ride, nonetheless.
A refreshing but too-brief turn on the international thriller—with better prose, but no more credibility than Ludlum.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7211-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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