by Linda Stasi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 22, 2013
Stasi trots out the usual tricks in this provocative but often clunky thriller that spotlights an evil conspiracy and a...
Media talking head and newspaper columnist Stasi pens a conspiracy thriller that chases the legend of a terrorist who might be more than he seems.
Overly plucky reporter Alessandra “Ali” Russo, a newspaper columnist like the author, happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when an accused international terrorist is brought to trial at the United Nations. Demiel ben Yusef stands accused by the International Court of Justice of causing the deaths of thousands in terrorist incidents aimed at religions across the globe. When Yusef, a prisoner under enormous security, improbably manages to stop and plant a kiss directly on the reporter’s mouth in full view of the world’s press, she’s stunned. Ali doesn’t know Yusef; she only knows that his trial is a three-ring circus, and covering it is the biggest story of her career. When she turns in a column that falls short of what her editor expects, she’s unceremoniously fired. Returning home, she finds her apartment ransacked and relies on an odd assortment of old and new friends to help her puzzle through the who, what and why of what is happening to her. Although the snooze-worthy courtroom opening falls flat with a silly and spectacularly dull trial, Stasi picks up the pace once she puts her heroine on the run in this familiar conspiracy-theory–centered novel, with its glib-talking, spunky protagonist, tackling of the controversial issue of cloning, religious persecution, international coverups and a bevy of priests, both as friendlies and heavies. Melodramatic in places, with a tendency to bog down in historical minutiae, the narrative takes a sometimes difficult-to-follow trip around the world, plunging Ali into intrigue, narrow escapes and a darkening plot that threatens both her life and the balance of world power.
Stasi trots out the usual tricks in this provocative but often clunky thriller that spotlights an evil conspiracy and a slightly past-her-prime reporter who chases a murky truth through numerous time zones, leaving the bad guys scrambling to keep their nefarious plans intact.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3427-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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by Linda Stasi
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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