A taut storyline with familiar characters facing new challenges.
The story of former CIA officer—and current president—Jack Ryan continues with the threat of North Korea building a nuclear arsenal.
After co-authoring a number of political thrillers with the late Clancy, Greaney (Tom Clancy Support and Defend, 2014, etc.) continues the author's legacy by creating a realistic portrayal of political, corporate and private espionage. Jack Ryan is in the midst of his second term as president but remains as focused on sifting through critical intelligence data as ever; in this novel, it is the lurking problem of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea going nuclear that is at the center of the action. The president’s oldest son, Jack Ryan Jr., also faces the North Korean threat while working for the privately funded Campus, alongside standby Clancy characters Domingo ''Ding'' Chavez, John Clark and Dominic ''Dom'' Caruso. When a former CIA case officer is stabbed to death in Vietnam, the Campus operators start digging into the circumstances and soon find themselves squaring off with former FBI Counterintelligence officer Wayne “Duke” Sharps, now running Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. In Duke’s employment are former intel operators from England and France who are helping the DPRK develop an outlaw rare earth mine which could potentially be worth trillions of dollars and provide the necessary financial base for developing a nuclear cache. The DPRK is willing to do anything to obtain nuclear weapons, even attempt an assassination of President Ryan. With all these elements in play, Greaney delivers a story reminiscent of the older Clancy novels by showing evidence of a deep understanding of spycraft, current events, and the natures of the people who work in the shadows, at the desk and on the front lines.
A taut storyline with familiar characters facing new challenges.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-17335-6
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
A proficient but routine thriller in which you can tell for miles in advance who’s disposable and who’s slated for survival,...
The past comes knocking for a former stripper who thought she’d said goodbye to all that in an altogether less-successful distaff reworking of The Innocent (2005).
In some ways, the life Megan Pierce left behind when she stopped giving lap dances and calling herself Cassie was perfect: exciting, glamorous and anything but routine. If only her abusive client Stewart Green hadn’t vanished under circumstances that strongly suggested a violent end, Megan would never have taken a powder, ultimately trading Atlantic City’s La Crème nightclub for the American dream with a lawyer husband, two perfect children and every appliance of the upscale suburban lifestyle. One day, however, Megan—motivated solely, it seems, by the need to kick-start the plot—decides to drop in at La Crème. Her sudden reappearance, together with her old colleague Lorraine Griggs’ sighting of somebody who looks a lot like Stewart and the remarkably similar disappearance exactly 17 years later of construction heir Carlton Flynn, sets in motion a new chain of violence and threatens to reveal all of Megan’s carefully hidden secrets. Eventually she reconnects with her old flame Ray Levine, a photographer who has hit the skids big time, and tells what she knows to Det. Broome of Atlantic City Homicide. But both men’s most protective instincts are challenged by a pair of wholesome killers calling themselves Barbie and Ken—and by the fact that Broome’s own boss is working against him.
A proficient but routine thriller in which you can tell for miles in advance who’s disposable and who’s slated for survival, marked by the virtual absence of the baroque plot twists fans of Coben (Live Wire, 2011, etc.) expect as their due.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95227-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
Sophomore slump.
More psychological suspense from the author of Final Girls (2017).
Anyone who grew up watching horror movies in the 1980s knows that summer camp can be a dangerous place. It certainly was for Emma Davis during her first stay at Camp Nightingale. The other three girls in her cabin disappeared one night, never to return. Fifteen years have passed, years in which Emma has revisited this ordeal again and again through her work as a painter. When she’s offered another opportunity to spend a summer at the camp, Emma barely hesitates. She’s ostensibly there to serve as an art instructor, but her real mission is to finally find out what happened to her friends. Thrillers are, by their very nature, formulaic. Sager met the demands of the genre while offering a fresh, anxiety-inducing story in Final Girls. The author is less successful here. Part of the problem is the pacing. It’s so slow that the reader has ample time to notice how contrived the novel’s setup is. Emma is clearly unwell, so her decision to go back to the site of her trauma makes some sense, but it’s hard to believe that the camp’s owners would want her back, especially since she played a pivotal role in turning one of them into a suspect and nearly ruining his life. As a first-person narrator, Emma withholds a lot of information, which feels fake and frustrating; moreover, the revelations—when they come—are hardly worth the wait. And it’s hard to trust an author who gets so many details wrong. For example, Emma’s first summer at Camp Nightingale would have been around 2003 or so. It beggars belief that a 13-year-old millennial wouldn’t be amply prepared for her first period, but that’s what Sager wants readers to think. There’s a contemporary scene in which girls walk by in a cloud of baby powder, Noxzema, and strawberry-scented shampoo, imagery that is intensely evocative of the 1970s and '80s—not so much 2018. The novel is shot through with such discordant moments, moments that lift us right out of the narrative and shatter the suspense.
Sophomore slump.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4307-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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