An absorbing espionage tale with surges of action and a sci-fi undertone.
A California man with extrasensory perception suspects his sister’s place of employment is somehow responsible for her brutal assault in this debut thriller.
Jack McDonald, a senior partner at the investment banking company DealMaker, rushes to his younger sister’s place when friend and security guy Bob White tells Jack he’s lost connection to her alarm. Evidently, Jack’s sibling, Meghan, and her wife, Dvora Schacter, interrupted a burglary in progress and were beaten by the robber, Meghan so severely she’s in a coma. Jack’s a “reader,” an ability he equates with ESP, and this intuition already had him uneasy about biotech firm ReWire, Inc., where Meghan is the chief scientist. Sure that ReWire and President Donald O’Hare are dirty, Jack has colleagues look into the company’s stocks, and, as it turns out, there’s a strong possibility of insider trading. Someone, undoubtedly anxious, taps Jack’s phone line and later tries to kill him as well as his maybe-girlfriend Hong Lee. He’s more determined than ever to find the man who attacked Meghan and Dvora, while culpability may lie with a mysterious church led by “Her Grace,” an ailing but formidable woman who’s brewing something sinister. Soon Jack will have to track down the church to put a stop to dubious goings-on, with the newly added task of proving himself innocent of a murder frame-up. The novel incorporates supernatural elements pragmatically, with Jack’s ESP as just another skill set. He, for example, can only sometimes predict the future, and his telepathic link to comatose Meghan is more sensation than straightforward conversation. The protagonist, meanwhile, is surrounded by grounded characters, like smart investigating cop Alvin Yan and Bob and Jack’s other pal, DealMaker CTO Alice Stewart-White. Jack and Alice’s mutual loathing gradually develops into quite the opposite. There’s definite mystery, particularly with regard to Her Grace’s ultimate goal, but the latter half’s more invigorating once Jack’s on the run and able to utilize his Special Forces training in a memorable snowy setting. Cameron teases the chance of a sequel near the end, for both the good guys and the bad, including one character who seems to be keeping mum about telekinetic potential.
An absorbing espionage tale with surges of action and a sci-fi undertone.Pub Date: March 24, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 440
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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