The cliffhanger endings Rick’s adventures supply are likely to distract readers along with the Yorkshire constabulary. Yet...
The motive for a Yorkshire girl’s disappearance lies buried with another local girl a century dead.
Ten years after a domestic-violence case gone horribly wrong drove him from the police force, Rick Rounder is back from far-off Queensland. Accompanied by his bemused black girlfriend Naomi, he’s determined to lay his ghosts and make his way by hanging out his shingle as a private eye. Chief Inspector Sam Rounder, who wouldn’t be likely to welcome his baby brother back home in any event, has his hands full with the kidnapping of Polly Markham, snatched from outside her house by a man who killed the family dog. Even when the self-styled amateur historian identifies himself in a stunningly unforeseeable scene, his confession only deepens the mystery: He’s taken Polly because he “wanted to put things right” for the death of nine-year-old Esme Percy in 1901. Can Sam Rounder’s force find Polly before she’s as dead as her spectral twin? Their investigation would be a lot simpler if Rick Rounder’s very first case, the routine shadowing of Will Wistow’s adulterous wife to gather evidence for a divorce, didn’t keep getting him into waves of trouble from unexpected sources.
The cliffhanger endings Rick’s adventures supply are likely to distract readers along with the Yorkshire constabulary. Yet Cole’s debut novel rings so many fresh changes on the echoes-of-the-past thriller that even more readers will welcome the series it introduces.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58659-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Once again, bestselling Hoag (The Alibi Man, 2007, etc.) plots craftily and creates characters readers root for.
Nail-biting thriller about a vicious serial killer with a particularly creepy MO.
On their way home from school, three fifth-graders take a detour through a neighboring woods and oh, how they’ll wish they hadn’t. It’s a fateful detour with agonizing consequences that will render their lives nightmarish. They stumble on the corpse of a young woman, insanely mistreated, and yet there is method to the madness: “Eyes glued shut. Mouth glued shut. See no evil. Speak no evil.” A message certainly, but exactly how to interpret it? The badly shaken ten-year-olds are all pupils in a class taught by Anne Navarre, who comes upon the crime scene a few minutes later. Anne is a young woman with her own firsthand experience of childhood trauma, sufficiently hurtful to make her instantly empathic. She cares deeply about her students, senses the possibility of long-term damage and, wanting only to help, finds herself contending with entrenched parental obtuseness. Enter Vince Leone, an FBI profiler dispatched from Washington who soon enough will also be caring deeply—for Anne. Meanwhile, the local cops plus Vince have come to realize that whatever fixed idea the “See-No-Evil Killer” is possessed by, he has now proclaimed it at least three times. Clearly, they have a sociopath on their hands, one of the self-anointed brilliant kind who gets off on playing catch-me-if-you-can with slow-witted, outclassed cops. The investigation intensifies, the suspect list narrows, but fear grips the quiet California community of Oak Knoll, 20,000 people no longer convinced that “things like this don’t happen here.”
Once again, bestselling Hoag (The Alibi Man, 2007, etc.) plots craftily and creates characters readers root for.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-95130-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
Another well-crafted and enjoyable escape from reality. The Ryans just keep on saving the world.
The latest in the action-filled series of thrillers based on characters created by the late Tom Clancy (Oath of Office, 2018, etc.) and continued here by Maden.
Malign forces are trying to steal America’s vital secrets, which it keeps in the highly secure IC Cloud. Naturally, a security breach would be catastrophic. China is the biggest cybersecurity threat by far, and it may have American allies. Sen. Deborah Dixon, who wants President Jack Ryan’s job, says in a speech that “the future belongs to America and China,” and a Ryan aide speculates that she may be in league with the Chinese. Meanwhile, Jack Ryan Jr. is a financial analyst at Hendley Associates who is sent to Poland to see if there is a connection between China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Poland. In Warsaw, he is assigned a Polish assistant, Agent Liliana Pilecki. She’s good-looking, of course, and exceptionally brave. There’s an unrequited sexual tension between them that reflects especially well on Jack Jr. as a heck of a decent guy. Early on, his cancer-stricken friend, Cory, makes a deathbed request that Jack feels honor-bound to keep. “A man keeps his word,” he thinks, and he goes to heroic lengths to do so. Jack Ryan Jr. is definitely someone you want on your side, and not because he’s the president’s son. He is the quintessential good guy—tough, smart, honorable, unafraid. Handcuffed with his hands behind his back atop a Peruvian mountain and saying he needs to pee, he asks a captor for help. “If you’re nice, you can hold it for me,” he wisecracks. “Of course, you’ll have to use both hands.” Now that’s a red-blooded American. Author Maden’s style meshes perfectly with the classic Clancy yarns, with global action, struggle, suffering, and formidable foes who get what they deserve.
Another well-crafted and enjoyable escape from reality. The Ryans just keep on saving the world.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-54169-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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