A multilayered investigative tale with plenty of action and comic relief.
A crime thriller series installment about a former FBI agent investigating the death of his brother.
Eidswick follows up his previous work, When Moths Burn (2019), with another novel featuring James Strait, a former G-man who still knows how to handle himself should violence arise. After his estranged brother is murdered in Tucson, James has plenty of reason to fight. Ricky Strait worked as a lawyer for an organization that provided legal aid to undocumented immigrants. Although James is initially called to Tucson just to identify Ricky’s body, he quickly becomes embroiled in the investigation into his sibling’s death. Ricky had been meeting with a drug runner named Ferris Davis prior to his death, and authorities believe that the latter murdered 13 people at a local ranch. Ferris, a meek man with a speech disorder, is generally well liked, and those who know him believe he’s relatively harmless. Still, the police and FBI offer James $50,000 to bring Ferris in; he could certainly use the money as well as the satisfaction of bringing his brother’s killer to justice. But what if Ferris is innocent? Eidswick crafts James as a rough-and-tumble protagonist with a sense of humor. For example, when a young tough tells James that he broke a window to “fight back,” James replies “Fight back? You broke a window. Are you fighting back against glass?” This gives him a likable quality not always seen in a hero who can, say, take down two cartel bodyguards while barely breaking a sweat. Not all the dialogue is quite as sharp, but the story takes some unexpected twists, and there’s a whole lot more going on in Tucson than readers will likely expect. However, they’ll know that James, whether he’s cracking wise or cracking skulls, will get to the bottom of it.
A multilayered investigative tale with plenty of action and comic relief.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2022
ISBN: 979-8793395823
Page Count: 697
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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