A sound sophomore effort with enough espionage fuel to power a future entry in the series.
Two intelligence agents from the United States and India, respectively, work together to stop Iran from launching a nuclear missile at Israel in Richardson’s (Dragon’s Paw, 2012) political thriller.
American operative Adam Chin and Col. Supriya Lal of India’s Defense Intelligence Agency make a good team, both as agents and lovers. Their latest mission—and second book—finds them in Uzbekistan to take down human traffickers. It’s there, however, that they find evidence that Iran may be using smuggled gold to fund their nuclear program. The two track the gold to a bank in Turkey and soon realize that Iran is planning a nuclear strike against Israel. With the White House fearing blame for a resultant war if the U.S. assists Israel, Chin and Supriya are on their own in their effort to thwart nuclear devastation in the Middle East. The first half of Richardson’s novel reads like an espionage story, as Chin and Supriya follow a truck from a gold mine and creep into a corrupt banker’s room to pilfer information. They even employ vaguely described but 007–esque “electronic gizmos” for such tasks as opening a locked safe. The second half is more in tune with Richardson’s previous novel, featuring multiple perspectives from a bevy of characters that occasionally sidelines the protagonists. Nevertheless, these characters are engrossing and relevant, as they include a possible mole among the Iranian baddies as well as TV reporter Mariella Sadat in Tehran, the site of the story’s climax. This structure also allows for a spotlight on the villains, such as the especially vicious Davood “David” Shirazi of Iran’s secret police. Chin and Supriya sometimes seem a bit too good at what they do; being handcuffed, for example, doesn’t stop either of them from knocking out a couple of security guards. But as the story introduces more characters and expands the plot—Iranian enforcers instigate riots in Tehran, for example—the duo is unable to avoid capture and possibly worse. The couple’s relationship, too, shows progress, but a secret could threaten their future.
A sound sophomore effort with enough espionage fuel to power a future entry in the series.Pub Date: April 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-1678-7
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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