by M. Jules Bevans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 2014
A serviceable thriller, bolstered by its contemporary backdrop.
Bevans’ debut thriller tells a story of a terrorist cell planning a campaign of assassinations and deadly chemical attacks—and of those working to thwart its plans.
Mehmet Osman is an English teacher in Istanbul who covertly operates a website that extols his radical Islamist views and supports the actions of al-Awlaki, a terrorist group operating in Yemen. When the leader of that group is killed, Mehmet is contacted by his friend Karim and asked to do an undisclosed favor. Their exchange tips off the Turkish intelligence agency and the CIA, who deduce that Karim is actually Ali Bin Shah ram, who’s now al-Awlaki’s de facto head. They believe that the new leader’s looking to avenge the death of his predecessor, so they apprehend Mehmet and violently interrogate him until he breaks down and agrees to become a CIA spy in exchange for his family’s safety. As Mehmet struggles to reconcile his political and religious convictions with his newfound role, he’s also burdened by his growing attraction to Josie, the CIA agent training him. The novel touches on many topics relevant to current global politics, which are certain to be familiar and evocative for many readers. Al-Awlaki, for example, has links to al-Qaida, and their agenda against the West is driven by notions of jihadist vengeance. Drone strikes and brutal interrogation techniques are also major plot elements, and only sharpen the novel’s topicality. Bevans doesn’t dwell on the moral or political quandaries of such controversial subjects, however, instead choosing to focus mainly on plot and character. His spare prose maintains a steady momentum, pushing the plot forward quickly enough to keep readers engaged while also providing the characters with substantial depth. However, the novel’s romance subplot may strike many readers as clichéd, and it feels superfluous next to the weighty issues driving the main plot.
A serviceable thriller, bolstered by its contemporary backdrop.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493162420
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 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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