A thriller with well-crafted characters that is hampered by cumbersome exposition.
In Kaplan’s (A Colony of Eves, 2011, etc.) latest novel, a personal injury attorney’s ties to a conspiracy theorist and the daughter of a cult leader draws him into a dangerous world of Cold War intrigue.
In 1989, David Miller, an affable, successful tort lawyer, finds it odd when his old high school friend U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois Michael Eisenberg calls him at work. It turns out that he’s calling at the behest of the FBI with questions about their eccentric, estranged mutual friend Benny Friedman, who was obsessed with the JFK assassination, and Benny’s former neighbors, a fringe religious sect called “Truce of God.” The FBI and CIA claim that Truce of God has lured away an important government scientist. David once had an unrequited, teenage love for Lena Montgomery, the daughter of the sect’s leader, and the agencies use this fact to ensure his assistance in their investigation. But what David doesn’t know is that the scientist is fictional—just a ploy to lure Benny out of hiding before he reveals secrets about the Kennedy murder. The novel has a strong setup, and it effectively establishes the characters’ longtime friendships. The flashbacks to Lincolnwood, Illinois, where they grew up, capture a familiar spirit of the 1960s. Kaplan also gives readers a tangible sense of David’s life within a real community, and his interactions with his genial lawyer uncle and overly nosy secretary establish him as well-meaning and savvy. However, the book largely discards such pleasant flourishes later, as steady exposition dominates the latter half—ranging from Benny’s manifesto about JFK’s death to the motivations of the villain, CIA agent Tristan Conrad. More action scenes, or even a few tender character moments, might have broken things up a bit. Instead, the novel cuts short a tense shootout and denies readers a chance to revel in David and Lena’s reunion.
A thriller with well-crafted characters that is hampered by cumbersome exposition.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497478596
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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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