This is good, Clancy-esque entertainment. May the evildoers of the world have nightmares that Violator becomes a real person.
Bad guys galore live and die in this latest entry in the Gray Man series (Agent in Place, 2018, etc.).
Courtland Gentry—code-named Violator —is a freelance assassin on contract with the CIA. His handler, series regular Suzanne Brewer, is often frustrated with his propensity to act alone. “Being a team player had been fun while it lasted,” Violator muses at one point, “but it was time to go off mission.” So Brewer is tempted to take drastic action, but he’s hardly her only problem. Zoya Zakharova is a former Russian spy code-named Anthem who’s flipped to the West and is “an equally insubordinate singleton.” The threat they all have to worry about is definitely a team player. She is Won Jang-Mi, aka Janice Won, a West-hating North Korean scientist specializing in pneumonic plague and hemorrhagic fever. Russians are behind a plot for Won to unleash a biological attack on the West, and she has a 10-week deadline to get it done. Meanwhile, Zakharova’s father, Feodor Zakharov, now lives in the West under the alias David Mars, and each believes the other is dead. Father and daughter working passionately on opposite sides—imagine the coming family reunion! This novel is vintage Greaney, with a tight plot, a ticking clock, and a sympathetic antihero. Violator is “not psyched at all about killing multiple carloads of men,” but he loses no sleep over it, either. The action is almost nonstop, with nice twists right to the end. There are also small doses of humor, as when tough guy Zack Hightower whines about his CIA code name, Romantic. The characters are by and large plucked from central casting, but they suit the story’s needs well enough.
This is good, Clancy-esque entertainment. May the evildoers of the world have nightmares that Violator becomes a real person.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-48894-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A mesmerizing psychological drama on loss, guilt, frustration and implacable, unexplainable evil.
In Hoag's (Secrets to the Grave, 2010, etc.) latest literary suspense novel, Lauren Lawton, "ragged and torn and shredded," has retreated to bucolic Oak Knoll to heal.
The Lawtons lived the perfect life in nearby trendy Santa Barbara, and then their older daughter, Leslie, only 16, disappeared. It was certainly kidnapping, although no body was ever discovered. Lauren's husband couldn't recover from the tragedy and eventually died, apparently a suicide. Lauren always believed she knew who took Leslie, and her relentless pursuit of the shadowy Roland Ballencoa cost Lauren her social reputation and the support of the police. As the story moves to Oak Knoll, Hoag's regulars, Sheriff Detective Tony Mendez and retired FBI profiler Vince Leone and his wife Anne, a counselor, enter the narrative. Mendez begins an investigation, slowly coming to comprehend that Lauren isn't simply a woman mired in an unreconcilable past. Mendez learns that Ballencoa, a part-time photographer who has supposedly gone straight after serving time for a youthful sex crime, has followed Lauren to Oak Knoll. An intriguing new character in the familiar Hoag milieu is Santa Barbara police detective Danni Tanner, hard-bitten, cynical, sarcastic and totally dedicated. As Mendez probes deeper into Ballencoa's history and finds little solid evidence, Lauren relentlessly pushes for action, considers vigilantism and nears collapse because of guilt over her emotional neglect of younger daughter, Leah, now the same age as Leslie when kidnapped. With a shady private investigator named Gregory Hewitt as catalyst, the narrative ramps up to a gut-wrenching and violent conclusion, albeit one that leaves a minor plot point adrift. Hoag has an eye for a writerly turn of phrase—“another verse in a poem of futility”—which makes it all the more disconcerting to stumble upon a cliché or to find the author posing an analogy that compares both the bad guy's and the hero's gaze to that of a shark.
A mesmerizing psychological drama on loss, guilt, frustration and implacable, unexplainable evil.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-525-95239-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Advertising executive Patterson doubles neither our pleasure nor our fun by giving us two intense, Hannibal Lecter-type murderers for the price of one in an improbable and hopelessly derivative mess of a thriller. Feds and local authorities on both coasts are baffled by a pair of serial killers targeting beautiful young women: The Gentleman Caller works the scene in sunny L.A., where he brutally murders and dismembers his prey; his counterpart back East, who calls himself Casanova, trolls the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area for sexy coeds to victimize. Their MOs provide plenty of fodder for an author trying to cook up a work of psychological terror: Both are powerful, handsome, brilliant (natch), commit perfect crimes, and, despite their busy schedules, manage to keep in touch with each other. To catch them, you obviously need a perfect crime fighter. Enter Alex Cross, the Washington, D.C., detective/psychologist hero of bestselling Along Came A Spider (1993), who gets dragged into all this after his niece Naomi, a student at Duke University, vanishes. Working with the authorities and a medical student named Kate McTiernan, who was lucky enough to escape Casanova's clutches, Cross begins to understand how the two dueling psychos operate. Just in the nick of time, too, because the Gentleman Caller, on the run from the law out West, decides that nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina with his old buddy Casanova. So, what does Cross, whose favorite niece is now in the clutches of two sickos, do? Fall in love with Kate McTiernan, of course, in an ill-placed romantic subplot intended to raise the stakes in the deadly cat-and-mouse game. Does Cross save Naomi? Are the two killers brought to justice or, at the very least, consigned to gory demises? Who cares? As a storyteller, Patterson is a great ad copywriter.
Pub Date: Jan. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-69370-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK TO SCREEN
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