SHAKE THE JAR

Visions of the past intermingle with contemporary threats in this international thriller, one in a series.

This entry in O’Connor’s series (following The Key to Kells in 2022 and Threshold in 2023) finds the heroic central couple, Key and Arin Murphy, relaxing in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in the wake of the events of the previous novel—events that have left Arin with a wound that needs healing and both of them with a number of shadowy enemies. As the story opens, the two are accosted by a thug (“I was asked to deliver a message”) while they’re enjoying time on the beach, and the danger facing them only grows greater from this point on as the narrative broadens its scope. The author takes readers through his customary variety of picturesque foreign locations (including Jamaica and Chile) and doles out bits of contemporary headlines to ground readers thoroughly in the present-day setting of the book; there’s increased Chinese saber-rattling about the independence of Taiwan and, more pointedly, the West is still reeling from Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine. Against this backdrop of international tension, a plot involving Key and Arin unfolds in which Arin experiences vivid flashes of images that seem to be coming to her from the distant past. As these increase in number and detail, Key and Arin realize that she’s having visions of an ancestor of hers, a Black man who seems to have fought alongside Chilean forces against the Spanish in Chile’s War of Independence 200 years prior. The deeper Key and Arin go into the mystery of this ancestor’s identity, the more the clandestine forces opposing them step up their attacks.

The cat-and-mouse machinations of the heroes and their nefarious opponents take the story into a wide variety of not only far-flung locales but also distant time periods, all brought to vivid life by O’Connor in these pages. The author’s descriptions of the settings were a reliable strength of the previous volumes and continue to be highlights here. This makes for seductive reading, which is fortunate, because O’Connor’s attempts to ground readers in the arcana of the history of his characters fall a bit short for those who’ve missed the first two installments in this saga of high adventure and high-strung emotions—the author fails to take any of the myriad natural opportunities early in the story to catch readers up on what they’ve missed (or forgotten). Still, this flaw is very much mitigated by all of the things O’Connor does right: His exotic locations are rendered with color and fidelity, his characters dramatically seize every moment they’re given, and, most importantly, the book’s pacing and dialogue make it a genuine page-turner. (The way O’Connor fleshes out the main plot about dangerously escalating tensions between China and Taiwan is particularly compelling.) The novel’s single strongest narrative point—Key learning things about his past in richly rendered flashbacks to other lives—has by this point been honed by the author into a signature dramatic device; it makes this third entry in the saga of Key and Arin compulsively readable.

A sharp and expertly done espionage thriller fueled by the past lives of the main characters.