At about 500 pages, this one is fat, fast, and fun. Clancy's spirit lives on.
The latest high-energy entry in the Gray Man series (Back Blast, 2016, etc.).
Courtland Gentry, also known as the Gray Man, is everything you’d want in a fictional professional killer. The CIA agent–turned-freelancer is still on America’s side, he’s deadly against superior odds, and he trots out a conscience now and then. The CIA sends Gentry to Hong Kong for an assignment that is "possibly the most important of his life," but he's soon kidnapped. Identifying himself to his captors as “just a hired hit man looking for work,” he isn’t in town a full day before he kills two Chinese intelligence operatives. Then he learns his true mission, finding a Chinese defector for the CIA. Gentry isn’t sure whether he’s rescuing or kidnapping Fan Jiang, but it doesn’t matter. Fan is an information technology specialist from Mainland China who wants to go to Taiwan. The CIA wants Fan because he knows “the Chinese secure networks inside and out,” Chinese intelligence wants him back for the same reason, and even Vietnamese soldiers and gangsters are in on the hunt. And there is Zoya Zakharova, the beautiful (of course) Russian foreign intelligence agent assigned to bring Fan Jiang to Russia. She’s Gentry’s one adversary who is his equal. The action is fast and complicated with bodies galore—all for a good cause, of course—and one literal cliffhanger. Author Greaney co-wrote several Tom Clancy novels, and this thriller is tailor-made for Clancy’s fans. The Gray Man’s character is several shades darker than Jack Ryan’s, though he lacks Ryan’s depth. But Gentry always gets the job done for the US of A, and he entertains while doing it. Whether he kills or beds Zakharova, readers will have to find out.
At about 500 pages, this one is fat, fast, and fun. Clancy's spirit lives on.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-425-28285-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.
A lonely British schoolteacher falls for an American man incarcerated for the murder of a young woman. What could possibly go wrong?
Samantha, 31, is still reeling from a bad breakup when she discovers Framing the Truth: The Murder of Holly Michaels, an 18-year-old true-crime documentary about the killing of a young girl by then-18-year-old Dennis Danson, aka the suspected Red River Killer, who’s still on death row in Florida’s Altoona Prison. Sam writes to Dennis, and soon they’re declaring their love for each other. Sam flies to the U.S. to meet him, and although they’re separated by plexiglass, she knows that she’s found the love of her life. The chirpy Carrie, who co-produced and directed the first documentary, is Sam’s guide while she’s there, and Sam accompanies her while they film a new series about Dennis, A Boy from Red River. Sam and Dennis quickly marry when new evidence comes to light and Dennis is exonerated and released. Amid a whirlwind of talk shows, celebrity attention, and the new series premiere, married life isn’t quite what Sam had hoped for: intimacy is nonexistent, the already self-loathing Sam feels unloved and unwanted, and the appearance of Dennis’ clingy childhood friend Lindsay Durst sends Sam into a jealous fit. After Dennis’ father dies, they move into Dennis’ childhood home, and Sam begins to suspect he may be hiding something. After all, what actually happened to all those other missing girls? Refreshingly, Lloyd seems absolutely unconcerned with whether or not her characters are likable, and although a few British sayings ("round," “in hospital”) make their way into the dialogue of the American characters, her research into the aftereffects of long incarceration is obvious, and her portrait of an emotionally damaged woman feels spot-on.
A grim and unbearably tense debut chiller with an unexpected and utterly fitting finale.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-335-95240-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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