The immediacy of Duns' writing grabs and suspends the reader in a beautifully realized heartbeat of recent history.
A trio of gritty spy yarns featuring British double agent Paul Dark.
Free Agent (first published in the U.S. in 2009) opens with a meeting between veteran agent Dark, who narrates, and the imperious Chief, ostensibly to discuss the dicey Nigerian situation. Instead, their lengthy cat-and-mouse discussion reaches all the way back to World War II, when Chief was in charge and Dark a field operative. Chief has recently discovered that there was a traitor in their midst, perhaps someone still at work. In an instant, Dark shoots him dead and then begins to cover his tracks, an activity that involves both going to Nigeria and remembering Anna, the beautiful Russian lover who attempted to turn him. After assuming that Anna was dead, he learns that she may be alive after all. Song of Treason (published in the U.K. in 2010) opens at the funeral of Chief, who is revealed as Sir Colin Templeton. Dark is delivering a funeral oration and just beginning to breathe easier about his freedom when a gunshot likely meant for Dark kills a colleague standing next to him. The game, so to speak, is afoot. The brand-new Moscow Option offers Dark a chance at redemption. Flashbacks aside, the entire span of the three novels covers but a few months in 1969, the latter installments finding greater depth and resonance in developments of the first. The weight of Duns' historical detail is impressive—each tale includes a lengthy bibliography—and the whole of the trilogy is much greater than the sum of its parts.
The immediacy of Duns' writing grabs and suspends the reader in a beautifully realized heartbeat of recent history.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-14-312069-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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