A quick-hit international adventure led by a Yank full of bravado.
In this fourth installment of Yocum’s thriller series, a former CIA operative comes out of retirement to track down a missing undercover agent in Australia.
Former CIA investigator Dennis Cunningham is enjoying early retirement in Western Australia with his girlfriend, Judy White, an Australian Federal Police investigator. One night, at a supposedly social dinner, Judy’s superior offers Dennis a job: $500,000 to find David Chu, a missing Chinese agent whom Australian intelligence had been keeping tabs on. Dennis is reluctant but decides that he can’t turn down good money, and he stipulates that Judy must be his intermediary. The investigation starts off rocky when Dennis senses Australian agents aren’t telling the whole truth, and he doesn’t like being handled.The situation darkens when he receives a threatening note and is beaten by a mysterious assailant in a parking lot after meeting with an old CIA friend. As Dennis traipses across Australia and even to the States to sniff out leads, he must temper his brashness with caution, as it turns out that finding Chu may be just the tip of an iceberg of conspiracies. Yocum’s series entry, following Valley of Spies (2019), freshens the American thriller genre with an Australian tinge. For instance, Dennis’ no-holds-barred approach satisfyingly contrasts with that of his by-the-book Australian contacts. Judy is also sharply drawn as a smart, underestimated cop, and a harrowing side plot involving her son, Trevor, shows her vulnerability. Much like Dennis, Yocum’s prose is straightforward, though some of the dialogue is awkwardly expository: “Dennis, would you stop punishing yourself about the past with your daughter? Your wife died many years ago. Let’s not open that can of worms.” Dennis’ virile-hero bit also strikes a sour note sometimes, with multiple mentions of how “attractive” he finds a colleague. Still, it’s an entertaining globe-trotter of a plot, complete with stakeouts, standoffs, and acerbic banter: “No, I did not beat the shit out of you in the parking lot,” says one of Dennis’ Aussie colleagues at one point, “But I wish the hell I had.”
A quick-hit international adventure led by a Yank full of bravado.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985534528
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
A tale that’s at once familiar and full of odd and unexpected twists—vintage King, in other words.
Narnia on the Penobscot: a grand, and naturally strange, entertainment from the ever prolific King.
What’s a person to do when sheltering from Covid? In King’s case, write something to entertain himself while reflecting on what was going on in the world outside—ravaged cities, contentious politics, uncertainty. King’s yarn begins in a world that’s recognizably ours, and with a familiar trope: A young woman, out to buy fried chicken, is mashed by a runaway plumber’s van, sending her husband into an alcoholic tailspin and her son into a preadolescent funk, driven “bugfuck” by a father who “was always trying to apologize.” The son makes good by rescuing an elderly neighbor who’s fallen off a ladder, though he protests that the man’s equally elderly German shepherd, Radar, was the true hero. Whatever the case, Mr. Bowditch has an improbable trove of gold in his Bates Motel of a home, and its origin seems to lie in a shed behind the house, one that Mr. Bowditch warns the boy away from: “ ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said. ‘You may in time, but for now don’t even think of it.’ ” It’s not Pennywise who awaits in the underworld behind the shed door, but there’s plenty that’s weird and unexpected, including a woman, Dora, whose “skin was slate gray and her face was cruelly deformed,” and a whole bunch of people—well, sort of people, anyway—who’d like nothing better than to bring their special brand of evil up to our world’s surface. King’s young protagonist, Charlie Reade, is resourceful beyond his years, but it helps that the old dog gains some of its youthful vigor in the depths below. King delivers a more or less traditional fable that includes a knowing nod: “I think I know what you want,” Charlie tells the reader, "and now you have it”—namely, a happy ending but with a suitably sardonic wink.
A tale that’s at once familiar and full of odd and unexpected twists—vintage King, in other words.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66800-217-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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