A few pleasantly different Swedish details (e.g., you can buy Christmas glogg, a nonalcoholic mulled wine, from street...
Routine woman-in-periler (“the most successful book ever published in Sweden,” we’re told) pits an aggressive journalist against a mad bomber haunting Stockholm’s Olympic Village.
Nothing keeps Annika Bengtzon, workaholic crime editor for a scrappy tabloid, from a story. Though married to kindly Thomas, who heads an organization of labor unions, and the mother of two perfect children, Bengtzon rushes out to cover the vile and the violent on Stockholm’s mean streets. When a bomb blows out half of the Olympic stadium, Annika cleverly pumps her taxi driver for info and beats the competition in discovering that a taxi driver had been injured in the blast—an important clue, it turns out, when pieces of the bombing’s single victim are assembled and identified as Christina Furhage, the glamorous, high-profile head of Stockholm’s Olympic Committee. While some suspect the bomber is a terrorist, Bengtzon gets a tip that the stadium’s security alarms had been circumvented before the bomb went off. Not only could the bomber have been someone within the Olympic organization, but the explosion may have been a cover-up for Furhage’s murder. Bengtzon’s take on the story creates clashes with her colleagues, whose jealousies and petty rivalries are obviously intended to support first-novelist and reporter Marklund’s feminist subtext: no matter how far women rise in the various social hierarchies, the slights, snubs, and private passions they suffer always seem worse than those of men. After some nasty secrets in Furhage’s past come to light, the bomber strikes again, then kidnaps Bengtzon, wires her with explosives, and sits her down at a laptop so that (preposterous as it sounds) she will write the truth about the bomber’s life and motives.
A few pleasantly different Swedish details (e.g., you can buy Christmas glogg, a nonalcoholic mulled wine, from street vendors) in a competent page-turner that moves fast to a clumsy end.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1783-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
The moral overcomes the mystery in this sobering cautionary tale.
A hard-partying flight attendant runs afoul of Russian conspirators.
Cassandra Bowden, like her namesake, the prophetess who is never believed, has problems. A flight attendant since college, Cassie, now nearing 40, has a penchant for drinking to the blackout point and sleeping with strange men. On a flight to Dubai, while serving in first class, she flirts with hedge fund manager Alex Sokoloff, an American with Russian roots and oligarchic connections. She repairs to his hotel room, and during the drunken bacchanal that follows, Miranda, apparently a business acquaintance of Alex’s, visits with more vodka. The next morning Cassie wakes up next to Alex, who lies dead, his throat cut. She has blacked out much of the night, so although she’d grown rather fond of him, how can she be sure she didn’t kill him? Rushing back for the return flight, she decides not to disclose what happened, at least not until she's back home in New York City, where the justice system is arguably less draconian than in Dubai. At JFK, the FBI interviews the deplaning crew, and Cassie plays dumb. Unfortunately, her walk of shame through the hotel lobby was captured on security cam. Sporadically intercut with Cassie’s point of view is that of Elena, a Russian assassin for hire, who had presented herself as Miranda in Alex’s hotel room. After being thwarted by Cassie’s presence from executing Alex then, she returned to finish the job but decided not to make collateral damage of his passed-out bedmate, a bad call she must rectify per her sinister handler, Viktor. In the novel’s flabby midsection, Cassie continues to alternately binge-drink and regret the consequences as her lawyer, her union, and even the FBI struggle to protect her from herself. Although Bohjalian (The Sleepwalker, 2017, etc.) strives to render Cassie sympathetic, at times he can’t resist taking a judgmental stance toward her. As Cassie’s addiction becomes the primary focus, the intricate plotting required of an international thriller lags.
The moral overcomes the mystery in this sobering cautionary tale.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54241-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Once again, bestselling Hoag (The Alibi Man, 2007, etc.) plots craftily and creates characters readers root for.
Nail-biting thriller about a vicious serial killer with a particularly creepy MO.
On their way home from school, three fifth-graders take a detour through a neighboring woods and oh, how they’ll wish they hadn’t. It’s a fateful detour with agonizing consequences that will render their lives nightmarish. They stumble on the corpse of a young woman, insanely mistreated, and yet there is method to the madness: “Eyes glued shut. Mouth glued shut. See no evil. Speak no evil.” A message certainly, but exactly how to interpret it? The badly shaken ten-year-olds are all pupils in a class taught by Anne Navarre, who comes upon the crime scene a few minutes later. Anne is a young woman with her own firsthand experience of childhood trauma, sufficiently hurtful to make her instantly empathic. She cares deeply about her students, senses the possibility of long-term damage and, wanting only to help, finds herself contending with entrenched parental obtuseness. Enter Vince Leone, an FBI profiler dispatched from Washington who soon enough will also be caring deeply—for Anne. Meanwhile, the local cops plus Vince have come to realize that whatever fixed idea the “See-No-Evil Killer” is possessed by, he has now proclaimed it at least three times. Clearly, they have a sociopath on their hands, one of the self-anointed brilliant kind who gets off on playing catch-me-if-you-can with slow-witted, outclassed cops. The investigation intensifies, the suspect list narrows, but fear grips the quiet California community of Oak Knoll, 20,000 people no longer convinced that “things like this don’t happen here.”
Once again, bestselling Hoag (The Alibi Man, 2007, etc.) plots craftily and creates characters readers root for.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-525-95130-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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