A convincing teenage protagonist and an ending that should leave readers impatiently awaiting a follow-up.
Having helped stop a terrorist attack the year before, 15-year-old Will Conlan may now be a target for revenge in Kalkowski’s (Red Cell, 2010) latest thriller.
Will’s only in high school but he’s an essential part of the CIA’s Analytic Red Cell, where he and others brainstorm possible ways that terrorists could strike. The teenager’s intuition and skill led to the thwarting of a bomb plot in Chicago the preceding year. Lately, though, he’s been having a spot of bad luck: his grades mysteriously change from A’s to F’s, and his school lunch account is inexplicably empty. But when Will, girlfriend Stacey Chloupek, and a couple pals are assaulted in an apparent mugging, CIA operative (and Will’s mentor) Mark Tenepior suspects that Will’s the intended target for something sinister. The assailant had a Facebook photo of Will and his friends, but it’s a subsequent invasion of the teenager’s home that confirms Tenepior’s hunch. The CIA stashes the Conlan family at a substation, which doesn’t prevent the baddie(s) from making contact. Someone sends a football ticket to Will after abducting Stacey. If Will hopes to see his girlfriend again, he’ll have to attend an upcoming game at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. This terrorist/kidnapper, it seems, not only wants retribution for last year’s failed strike, but may be planning another attack as well. The protagonist is a surprisingly believable hero, despite the story pitting him against terrorists. He aptly displays his indisputable intelligence in “red teaming” scenes, role-playing scenarios to develop defenses for potential attacks. Will’s mental prowess against villains’ brute strength, however, gives the character credibility, as the quick-witted teenager fends off a home invader with a curling iron and shampoo. There’s definitely dramatic tension once Will’s family and friends learn of his covert CIA status. But the novel’s missing some of the balance between normal teen life and Hollywood-esque action, at which Kalkowski’s debut excelled. The author makes up for this with unremitting tension: Will and Stacey struggling to escape restraints, paralleled with an exhilarating ongoing football game, is the story’s centerpiece. An outstanding final act forgoes resolution in favor of a ferocious cliffhanger.
A convincing teenage protagonist and an ending that should leave readers impatiently awaiting a follow-up.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7371-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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