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LARRY BOND’S FIRST TEAM

FIRES OF WAR

Relentless action. No time for reflection.

Bond and DeFelice send their First Team to Korea, where radioactive waste is turning up in the wrong places and a billionaire in the South is too chummy with nasty customers in the North.

Bob Ferguson, tough-guy-in-charge of the Special Demands First Team that takes on secret assignments for the CIA and the joint services, is still on the job despite the thyroid cancer that was eating him up in Larry Bond’s First Team (2004). Sexy and resourceful team-member Thera Majed, disguised as a mild-mannered steno, is part of an international inspection team on tour in the two Koreas and Japan. The inspectors are checking to see that all nuclear niceties are being observed, unaware that Thera is checking much deeper, with a special interest in what’s going on north of the DMZ, where Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il is known to be interested in manufacturing his own line of nuclear weapons. To the bewilderment of the Team’s managers, Thera finds radioactive evidence of the wrong kinds of activity in supposedly peaceful South Korea. The little detectors she’s sprinkled around what is supposed to be a legitimate waste-disposal site are glowing like so many Christmas bulbs. Thera’s news brings the fearless officer Ferguson and other teammates in for a Seoul search. Since everyone on the team has the guts of cat burglars, there is much sneaking into terrifying factories and bases and dumps, where their findings point to South Korean businessman and super-patriot Park Jin Tae. Park longs for Korea’s unified glory days and nurses a seriously deep grudge against the Japanese. Posing as a shady Russian arms dealer, Ferguson inserts himself into a “business trip” that Park and his associates make into North Korea and learns that Park is thick with a dangerous army general. But before he can get his news back to Washington, Ferguson is snatched and imprisoned and left to wither away from lack of thyroid medicine.

Relentless action. No time for reflection.

Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2006

ISBN: 0-765-30713-8

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Forge

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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