A study of loyalty confronting madness and evil.
Adler-Olsen (The Marco Effect, 2014, etc.) begins his first stand-alone thriller with a World War II reconnaissance mission.
During the flight, RAF pilots James Teasdale and Bryan Young, boyhood friends, are shot down. They avoid capture, slipping aboard an eastern front ambulance train, tossing two wounded Germans from a rail car and assuming their identities. Unknowingly, they now are assumed to be elite SS troopers with battle fatigue. While "[a]n SS officer could not be brought home insane"—"normally there was…an injection and a coffin"—the Nazis secretly hospitalized the more important ones. Tense and claustrophobic, the narrative finds James and Bryan confined with and harassed by three sadistic malingerers: Kröner, an "enormous, gnarled figure [with a] pockmarked face"; Lankau, a "broad-faced monster"; and Stich, their puppeteer. James is silenced by shock therapy and medication. Bryan resists and escapes. Home in England, he grows rich as a physician and inventor, but in 1972, a chance encounter reignites unsettled memories, even though "his bad conscience had lost intensity." He decides to return to Freiburg to learn James’ fate, though his friend is supposedly dead because the Allies had "wiped out that viper’s nest." Postwar, however, the three SS officers, rich on loot, secreted James in an institution; this is a weaker plot element, given the SS’s sociopathic evil. The novel then chronicles bloody, violent confrontations between Bryan and the former Nazis. While handling the conflict between loyalty and survival with nuance and depth, Adler-Olsen’s early battle scene isn’t as realistic or frightening as the story of the pair’s hospitalization. Nevertheless, he has a solid grip on settings, more so in Germany than England, and the complex tale unfolds with plausibly ambiguous emotions as Bryan discovers "[e]ach element had played its essential role in one magnificent lie."
A study of loyalty confronting madness and evil.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95489-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
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.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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