This debut thriller finds an entire family on the run from those who would sell bleeding-edge technology to the highest bidder.
In Park City, Georgia, Ron and Valerie Granger work for INESCO, a family-owned research company that develops technology for the U.S. government. Ron also happens to be an inactive CIA operative, while Valerie belonged to the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. They believe they’ve set their spy careers aside to raise their teen daughter, Leecy, but a home invasion may mean otherwise. After disabling one intruder and killing the other, the Grangers meet with FBI agent John Porter. He informs them that one of the intruders is a former INESCO employee, and perhaps they wanted to kidnap Leecy and leverage her for obtaining vital Department of Defense proposals. The Grangers disagree with Porter’s theory, maintaining that INESCO projects proceed under a shroud of coded secrecy. Later, when Leecy overhears sensitive information, the Grangers must run from the FBI and into the safekeeping of Ron’s former handler, Tammy Wakefield. With her help, they realize that INESCO has a greedy mole and that Ron’s legendary reputation as a violent, take-no-prisoners operative is their best hope for protecting everyone. In his aptly titled debut, author Davis does an excellent job laying the groundwork for upcoming volumes in the series. Ron and Valerie feel like true partners and parents, and Leecy is a believable teen (“my life is on that phone!”). Clever scenes also have Ron playing with his legend as a one-man Native American kill squad who only used a knife and a tomahawk. Valerie’s past as a Mossad assassin is more explicitly referenced; readers learn that she helped get Boris Yeltsin elected. As the tightly written plot advances, however, the Grangers’ familial bonds are so pervasive that it’s hard to feel the real danger. And though the details of CIA operations and modern technology are impressive, the narrative loses some bite when everyone stops to explain things to Leecy. Nevertheless, Davis sets a solid foundation for more adventures.
Sharply written and starring characters readers will be happy to meet again.
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990314417
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Simon & Winter, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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