Somehow, Greaney cranks out one winner after another. That’s a lot of work for the Gray Man and plenty of pleasure for...
Seventh in the high-powered Gray Man series (Gunmetal Gray, 2017, etc.).
The Islamic State group is about to execute Courtland Gentry—the Gray Man—and leave his body floating with others in a bloody lake. Then the story backs up a week to show how he got into this unholy mess. Gentry is ex-CIA, now an assassin for hire. He meets in Paris with Dr. Tarek Halaby, head of the Free Syria Exile Union, or what’s left of it. All the brave members are dead, Halaby says, and he jokes that perhaps Gentry would like to kill the Syrian president for him. “A mission into Syria,” they both agree, is “a fool’s errand.” Which naturally means he'll go there. Halaby hires him to rescue the model Bianca Medina from an imminent IS attack, part of a plan that Halaby hopes will "deal a serious blow to the Syrian regime and hasten the end" of the cruel civil war. A stunning beauty who’s protected by bodyguards in a Paris hotel, Medina is the lover of Ahmed al-Azzam, the brutal Syrian president and “most horrible man in the world"—and also, as she tells Halaby after Gentry brings her back to his safe house, she's secretly the mother of Jamal, Azzam's only son. Azzam’s wife, Shakira, aka “the First Lady of Hell,” knows about Bianca and wants her dead. (Thus the IS attack, which she manipulated.) Halaby isn't sure if Shakira knows about Jamal (she does), but he's sure she'll kill the boy if she does. Bianca is itching to return to Syria to be with Jamal, who's been left behind with a bodyguard, but Gentry, against his own better judgment, agrees to go get him. If there’s “one shot in hell” to snatch the child from the evil dad, “that shot was the Gray Man," a sharpshooter who will gladly kill Azzam if only he can get close enough. So, as anyone who follows the series knows, plenty of blood spills. Whether any of that blood is Assad's—oops, Azzam's—is for the reader to find out. Court Gentry claims to kill only for cash, yet he mostly nails just the bad guys—deep down, he has a moral code. Readers of the great Tom Clancy will salivate over this fast-moving and well-plotted yarn, which is part of a consistently appealing series in which each assignment is billed as the most dangerous ever.
Somehow, Greaney cranks out one winner after another. That’s a lot of work for the Gray Man and plenty of pleasure for thriller fans.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-48890-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
A page-turner that doesn’t quite stick the landing.
A fresh start for a doctor and her family becomes a living nightmare in Kubica’s (When the Lights Go Out, 2018, etc.) new psychological thriller.
Human ecology professor Will Foust and his wife, Sadie, a doctor, have two boys, 14-year-old Otto and 7-year-old Tate. On the outside, they look like the perfect family. After Will’s sister, Alice, dies from an apparent suicide, Sadie hopes that she and Will can provide stability for Alice’s 16-year-old daughter, Imogen. They’ve also decided to leave Chicago and move into Alice’s home on a small island off the coast of Maine, which Will has inherited. Unfortunately, Sadie, who used to practice emergency medicine, finds no satisfaction in her work at a local clinic; Otto is starting to show signs of the problems Sadie hoped he’d left behind; and though she understands that Imogen is devastated in the wake of her mother’s death, the girl is behaving in a downright alarming way, including gleefully showing Sadie a picture she took of her mother as she hung from the attic rafters. Sadie also thinks Will might be cheating on her. Again. The family tension stretches to a breaking point when a neighbor woman (whom Sadie thinks Will has been cozying up to) is stabbed to death. It’s not long before Sadie finds herself at the center of a murder investigation. Kubica ably molds Sadie into a (very) complicated woman with simmering secrets; as usual, she is a master of atmospherics who can turn almost any location into a swirling cesspool of creepy possibility. However, in a story told from multiple perspectives—first person and otherwise—a few are less compelling than others, such as that of over-the-top Camille, who claims to be having an affair with Will. And while Kubica sprinkles in a few clues about the big twist, she still asks readers to suspend disbelief to the breaking point.
A page-turner that doesn’t quite stick the landing.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6911-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.
A tragedy thrusts a mourning father into peculiar, otherworldly corners of New York City.
When Apollo and Emma have their baby, Brian, it feels like both reward and challenge for the new dad. Apollo, the son of a single mother, had been scraping by as a bookseller who hunts estate and garage sales for rare first editions, so even the unusual circumstance of Brian's birth (in a stalled subway train) seems like a blessing, as does the way Apollo stumbles across a first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird (inscribed by Harper Lee to Truman Capote, no less) shortly after. But after some young-parent squabbles and inexplicable images on their smartphones foreshadow trouble, the story turns nightmarish: Apollo finds himself tied up and beaten by Emma, then forced to listen to the sounds of Brian’s murder. LaValle has a knack for blending social realism with genre tropes (The Ballad of Black Tom, 2012, etc.), and this blend of horror story and fatherhood fable is surprising and admirably controlled. Though the plot is labyrinthine, it ultimately connects that first edition (“It’s just a story about a good father, right?”), Emma’s motivations, and the fate of their son, with enough room to contemplate everyday racism, the perils of personal technology, and the bookselling business as well. Built on brief, punchy chapters, the novel frames Apollo’s travels as a New York adventure tale, taking him from the basements of the Bronx to a small island in the East River that’s become a haven for misfit families to a seemingly sleepy neighborhood in Queens that’s the center of the story’s malevolence. But though the narrative takes Apollo to “magical places, where the rules of the world are different,” he’s fully absorbed the notion that fairy tales are manifestations of our deepest real-world anxieties. In that regard, LaValle has successfully delivered a tale of wonder and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be a parent.
A smart and knotty merger of horror, fantasy, and realism.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9594-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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