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TYRANNY OF SECRETS

Name: TYRANNY OF SECRETS
Author: John Statton

by John Statton ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 25, 2017

Short but impressive actioner featuring dynamic characters and a memorable open ending.

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In this debut techno-thriller, a white-hat hacker realizes she’s working for a cybersecurity company that’s a front for an illicit operation to collect everyone’s digital information and control elections.

Mariana McAllister proves she’s one of the best at a white-hat hacking competition involving universities in 2002. NetSecure CEO Mansfield Pickett certainly takes notice and offers her a job at his company, handling IT security for the likes of the NSA, FBI, and CIA. She’s only been with NetSecure for a few years when she gets a fairly shady assignment: ensure that a British man does not win his bid for prime minister. Conflicted by the questionable ethics, Mariana ends her relationship with her lawyer boyfriend, Sander Bonham, fearing a connection with her could damage his legal career or worse. Mariana doesn’t know that NetSecure’s a veneer for a secret group, the Politburo, plotting to gather global digital information for data mining as well as steer elections to manage the U.S. population. A decade later, Sander’s pal Paul Blake, after voicing his suspicion of someone siphoning data at a phone company, winds up a car bomb victim. Sander’s resultant investigation puts him in NetSecure’s cross hairs, right where Mariana will be once she employs her cyber skills to rescue her ex. Statton methodically establishes characters, from Mariana engaged in competition in ’02 to the early stages of the Politburo’s sinister scheme. This focus doesn’t make the baddies any less intimidating, especially assassin Seth Blaculf, with one eye ice-blue and the other black. Technical jargon with context is abundantly clear for all readers, while a theme of privacy, or lack of it, is prevalent throughout (with a couple of references to East Germany’s Stasi). Colorful details, meanwhile, radiate even at a political convention, with the audience a “frenzy of noise. Stomping. Shouting. A tribal rhythm. An awakened beast.” Unfortunately, a stellar scene of Mariana cyber-defending a hospitalized Sander from Seth by remotely accessing the medical center, is the only instance of hackers in genuine combat.

Short but impressive actioner featuring dynamic characters and a memorable open ending.

Pub Date: July 25, 2017

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 247

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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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.