A colorful, if training-heavy, covert-ops tale with an appealing protagonist.
Decades after finding a top-secret courier pouch, 68-year-old J. Paul Kingston trains to join a clandestine mission to Peru to retrieve a spy plane in Cole’s thriller series starter.
In 1972, on his last day working at the Hughes Aircraft Company in Culver City, California, Kingston is thrilled that “the guards and their leadership trusted me enough to let me see Howard Hughes’ inner sanctum.” Kingston has been working the night shift full time at Hughes and “as an emergency cryptographer for the U.S. Air Force at the same facility on the weekends” while also attending business school. He’s just earned his MBA, so he’s leaving all these activities behind to take a job as a business analyst and spend more time with his wife and kids. To celebrate his last day, the Hughes guards bring Kingston to the company founder’s private area, which includes a racing plane. Kingston finds a pouch stamped “TOP SECRET TANGO” inside the craft and makes a decision to bring it home with him for safekeeping. Decades later, the 68-year-old Kingston, a recent widower, removes the pouch from his home safe. He reaches out to the contact listed in its materials, which leads to meetings with Washington, D.C.–area intelligence agencies. Soon, he’s on a mission to retrieve a B-17 spy plane, now in Peru and being used for “nefarious activities, such as drug trafficking,” by Russian criminals. Kingston undergoes weeks of rigorous testing and training before the team goes undercover as tourists in Peru. Kingston is tasked with drawing the “bad actors” away from the B-17 but ends up being tortured by a Russian, bit by an anaconda, and more.
Cole, a partner at a wealth-management firm who also has an intelligence background, appears to have had a lot of fun crafting this return-to-duty fantasy, which features an aging baby boomer hero and splashy appearances by a parrot and “a huge harpy eagle, with legs as thick as a person’s arms.” The novel has an intriguing beginning, linking the always-fascinating Howard Hughes to espionage activities, although the recluse tycoon then fades from the plot. The novel’s detailing of the various spy planes that could, like this book’s B-17, be overtaken by rogue players lends a sense of real-life urgency to this narrative. The book’s training section, which has the feel of insider knowledge, takes up a large part of the narrative; indeed, the team doesn’t advance from training to touchdown in Peru until more than midway through the novel. However, this mission prep, while a bit overextended, has its pleasurable elements, as when Kingston and his team stumble upon real FBI and Russian spy doings during what was supposed to be just a simple “weekend field exercise.” Some of the plot points are a bit puzzling, such as the reason why Kingston didn’t contact anyone about the pouch for so long. Overall, though, this book is an entertaining, wild ride that ably sets up a potential series recounting Kingston’s further adventures.
A colorful, if training-heavy, covert-ops tale with an appealing protagonist.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2022
ISBN: 9798370275395
Page Count: 403
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers may wish to tackle this heart-pounding novel in highly populated, well-lit areas—snacks optional.
Some thrillers produce shivers, others trigger goose bumps; Cutter’s graphic offering will have readers jumping out of their skins.
Scoutmaster Dr. Tim Riggs takes his troop for their annual camping trip to Falstaff Island, an uninhabited area not far from their home on Prince Edward Island. The five 14-year-old boys who comprise Troop 52 are a diverse group: popular school jock, Kent, whose father is the chief of police; best friends Ephraim and Max, one the son of a petty thief who’s serving time in prison and the other the son of the coroner who also serves as the local taxidermist; Shelley, an odd loner with a creepy proclivity for animal torture and touching girls’ hair; and Newton, the overweight nerdy kid who’s the butt of the other boys’ jokes. When a skeletal, voracious, obviously ill man shows up on the island the first night of their trip, Tim’s efforts to assist him unleash a series of events which the author describes in gruesome, deliciously gory detail. Tom Padgett is the subject of a scientific test gone horribly wrong, or so it seems, and soon, the Scouts face a nightmare that worms its way into the group and wreaks every kind of havoc imaginable. With no way to leave the island (the boat Tom arrived on is disabled, and the troop was dropped off by a different boat), the boys fight to survive. Cutter’s narrative of unfolding events on the island is supplemented with well-placed interviews, pages from diaries, and magazine and newspaper articles, which provide answers to the reader in bits and pieces—but perhaps more importantly, it also delivers much-needed respites from the intense narrative as the boys battle for their lives on the island. Cutter (who created this work under a pseudonym) packs a powerful punch by plunging readers into gut-wrenching, explicit imagery that’s not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach.
Readers may wish to tackle this heart-pounding novel in highly populated, well-lit areas—snacks optional.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1771-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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