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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
Furiously suspenseful, but brain-dead second volume in Child’s gratuitously derivative Jack Reacher action series (Killing Floor, 1997). Reacher, a former Army Military Police Major, has now moved on to Chicago, where he gallantly assists a beautiful mystery woman hobbling on a crutch with her dry cleaning. Seconds later, Reacher and the woman, FBI agent Holly Johnson (also daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as goddaughter of the President), are kidnaped by armed gunmen. Handcuffed together and tossed in the back of a van, the two are taken to the Montana mountain stronghold of Beau Borken, a fat, ugly, psychopathically vicious neo-Nazi militia leader given to sawing the arms off day laborers and making windy speeches about how he brilliant he is. Of course, the kidnappers don’t know that they have a former military police major in their clutches who, in addition to having a Silver Star for heroism, is one of the best snipers the Army has ever produced, can pull iron rings out of barn doors, and kill bad guys with lit cigarettes. Meanwhile, a team of FBI agents, at least one of whom is a mole leaking information to Borken, identify Reacher from a reconstructed photo taken from the dry cleaner’s surveillance camera. Borken, impressed with Reacher’s military record, lectures him about his brilliant plan to overthrow the US using a hijacked Army missile unit, with Holly held as a hostage in a specially constructed, dynamite-lined prison cell. Borken stupidly lets Reacher best him in a shooting match, then grandiosely turns his back on his captives enough times for Reacher and Holly to escape, cause havoc, get captured, escape, make love in the woods, cause more havoc, and get captured again, as General Johnson, FBI Director Harlan Webster, and General Garber, Reacher’s former commander, plan a covert strike on Borken’s fortress that’s certain to fail. Another Rogue Warrior meets Die Hard with all the typical over-the-top plotting, blood-splattering ultraviolence, lock-jawed heroics and the dumbest villains this side of Ruby Ridge.
Pub Date: July 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14379-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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