On one level, it’s great entertainment; on another, a window into a sobering possibility.
A complex, scary thriller that feels too plausible for comfort.
Republican President Pauline Green is trying to steer the United States through a dangerous world. China spends billions in Africa to extend its global influence, while North African countries like Chad are beset by criminals and terrorists. But that’s secondary to the real problem: Rebels in North Korea try to overthrow the Communist dynasty and reunite the North and South, which scares the bejesus out of China. They fear the peninsula’s reunification, “a euphemism for takeover by the capitalist West.” The Chinese believe America and Europe want to destroy China “and would stop at nothing," so the last thing they need is a bordering nation with West-leaning sympathies. And domestically, Green faces “blowhard” wannabe president Sen. James Moore, who thinks there’s no point in having nukes if you won’t use them. Even her personal life is complicated: Her husband “was a good lover, but she had never wanted to tear his clothes off with her teeth.” In fact, the first spouses are quietly drifting apart. Yet she “could not fall in love” with another man. “It would be a hurricane, a train crash, a nuclear bomb.” Speaking of which, both superpowers have ironclad commitments to protect their allies, even if some crazy third parties get their hands on nuclear weapons. Will China and the U.S. be drawn into all-out war neither wants? This novel deals with the same great-power issues as Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis’ recent 2034, and both will give you the willies. Follett could have cut back on the North African subplot and delivered a tighter yarn, but then you mightn’t have learned that “a helicopter glides like a grand piano.” Anyway, that’s Follett: You’ll be so absorbed in the story threads that you’ll follow them anywhere—and you’ll suddenly realize you’ve read hundreds of pages.
On one level, it’s great entertainment; on another, a window into a sobering possibility.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-59-330001-5
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.
Now that he’s won two high-profile murder cases, Alabama “billboard lawyer” Jason Rich takes on his most challenging client: himself.
When methamphetamine lord Tyson Cade is gunned down outside a grocery store moments after clerk Marcia “Dooby” Darnell spurned his latest advance, you’d think the woods would be full of suspects, from Matty Dean, the distributor who immediately seizes violent control of the Sand Mountain meth operation in Cade’s absence, to the hard-used Dooby herself. But newly appointed Marshall County Sheriff Hatty Daniels and newly reelected D.A. Aloysius Holloway “Wish” French ignore all the others to concentrate on Jason, whose two earlier brushes with Cade brought him nothing but grief, who was seen nearby and caught on camera a few minutes later, and whom Cade identified as his killer with his dying breath. Insisting against all advice on defending himself, Jason accepts an inspired suggestion as his advisory counsel: Shay Lankford, the career prosecutor Wish French defeated in the last election. After rooting around endlessly in local secrets and scandals that take a heavy toll on Jason’s allies, profiler Albert Hooper comes up with enough evidence to guarantee a mistrial. But Jason doesn’t want a new trial; he wants to win the trial he’s in, and eventually he does, though not without spending a good deal of time relitigating the painful legacies of his first two murder cases. And although this case seems designed to avoid the very possibility of a surprise ending, Bailey closes by pulling a rabbit as big as a kangaroo from his hat.
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662516634
Page Count: 527
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A grim theme with a compelling and complex plot.
A one-eyed boy becomes a monster’s prey in this chilling tale of missing children.
Thirteen-year-old Missouri boy Joseph “Patch” Macauley was born with one eye, so he wears an eye patch and imagines himself a pirate. In 1975, he sees a masked man assaulting a girl in the woods. He attacks the man and saves her, but the predator kidnaps him instead. Patch eventually wakes in total darkness in a cellar where a different girl secretly visits him, heard but always unseen. He learns that her name is Grace and that there have been other girls down there before. Grace paints vivid word pictures of the places she’s seen and of stories by authors like Steinbeck. “Pray and stay alive,” she whispers to Patch. Eventually he escapes, but she is nowhere to be found. Searching for Grace is the underlying thread in a complicated quest that takes unexpected turns over the years and might well bring heartbreak. Meanwhile, the bodies of three girls turn up locally, and their parents grieve. Is the town doctor responsible for their deaths? A local school photographer? Both? Patch paints an image of Grace based only on what he’d heard from her in the cellar; then come more paintings and displays in an art gallery—an implausible achievement for an untrained artist. Meanwhile, Grace may be anywhere, and he must find her whether alive or dead. By now an adult, he “pinball[s]” from state to state, meeting with “a dozen families looking for a dozen lost girls.” To sustain himself he robs banks with an unloaded flintlock, and he shares his loot with organizations that are looking for missing children. He has “reasoned the truest proof of life [is] pain,” and he vows that he will die before he quits his search. This is much more than a whodunit, though it fills that bill well. It is also a richly layered tale of love, loss, and hope.
A grim theme with a compelling and complex plot.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798874
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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