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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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