A generation past Red October, the America-hating bad guys have added spyware, hacking, the dark web, and Bitcoins to those...
Greaney is at the helm of the action-adventure enterprise built by the military maestro from Maryland (Tom Clancy Commander In Chief, 2016, etc.), this time with a devious yet believable story about radical terrorist attacks in America.
Romanian hacker Alexandru Dalcu worms into a lost U.S. Office of Personnel Management file containing American security clearance applications. Dalcu’s techno-skulduggery employs open-source intel "fusing legal data with an illegal theft of data and then weaponizing the results." Wanting another price-boosting oil crisis, a rogue Saudi pays Dalcu to build dossiers on key American anti-terror fighters. The Saud then sells the info to Islamic State group honcho Abu Musa al-Matari. Abu recruits "cleanskins"—radical sympathizers unknown to security services—to strike the targets within America. The who-wants-to-kill-whom is further complicated because Dalcu and ARTD, his shady employer, had been hired for spy work by the People’s Republic of China, and they’re out for blood too. As previously, there’s a difficult buy-in: the chief protagonist is Jack Ryan Jr., son of longtime Clancy hero and now U.S. President Jack Ryan. Junior works (sans Secret Service) as an Uzi-toting operative for Hendley Associates, a private CIA–type company hiring out for blacker-than-black ops. Longtime Clancy characters like the indestructible Clark, Ding, and the president’s nephew, Dominic Caruso, are also Hendley agents. Newbie "Midas" Jankowski, former Delta Force op, adds one more iron-jawed one-dimensional terminator. Action around a female Army helicopter pilot/gunner in Iraq provides an additional minor thread as Hendley operatives Gulfstream from Bucharest to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the tense, fast-paced action reels out ripped-from-headlines homeland terror attacks.
A generation past Red October, the America-hating bad guys have added spyware, hacking, the dark web, and Bitcoins to those ubiquitous AK-47s.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17681-4
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Another success for the publishing phenom.
An abused boy fights back, escapes, then returns as an attorney to his beloved hometown, but just as he’s falling in love with a transplanted landscaper, a series of attacks from shadowy enemies jeopardizes their happiness.
“From the outside, the house in Lakeview Terrace looked perfect.” Which of course means that it wasn't. We're introduced to the horrifying Dr. Graham Bigelow, who beats his wife and, increasingly as the boy gets older, his son, Zane. On the night of Zane’s prom, a particularly savage attack puts him and his sister in the hospital, and his father blames Zane, landing him in jail. Then his sister stands up for him, enlisting the aid of their aunt, and everything changes, mainly due to Zane’s secret diaries. Nearly 20 years later, Zane leaves a successful career as a lawyer to return to Lakeview, where his aunt and sister live with their families, deciding to hang a shingle as a small-town lawyer. Then he meets Darby McCray, the landscaper who’s recently relocated and taken the town by storm, starting with the transformation of his family’s rental bungalows. The two are instantly intrigued by each other, but they move slowly into a relationship neither is looking for. Darby has a violent past of her own, so she is more than willing to take on the risk of antagonizing a boorish local family when she and Zane help an abused wife. Suddenly Zane and Darby face one attack after another, and even as they grow ever closer under the pressure, the dangers become more insidious. Roberts’ latest title feels a little long and the story is slightly cumbersome, but her greatest strength is in making the reader feel connected to her characters, so “unnecessary details” can also charm and engage.
Another success for the publishing phenom.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20709-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Most readers will be ahead of the twin investigators in identifying the guilty party. But the mystery is authentic, the...
Peerless networker Patterson (Woman of God, 2016, etc.), who’s become as ubiquitous as Betty Crocker, latches on to a co-author who ups his game in several welcome ways.
Called to a crime scene, Detective Patti Harney of the Chicago PD finds her twin brother, Detective Billy Harney, shot and left for dead in the bedroom of assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini’s condo. Amy is also present and even more dead. So is Billy’s partner, Detective Katherine Fenton. Working backward and forward from this opening tableau, the authors ask who shot whom and why. The answers are clearly rooted in a warrantless raid Billy led into an apartment building he’d become certain was operating as a sex club catering to Chicago’s finest, including the archbishop and the mayor—even though, as cautious percentage player Lt. Paul Wizniewski warned him, Billy was Homicide, not Vice. The blowback from the raid is predictably intense, entangling Billy, Kate Fenton, and Amy Lentini, who overcomes her initial animosity toward Billy sufficiently to take him to bed. The central mystery is the question of what’s become of the little black book in which Amy is certain Ramona Dillavou, the manager of the sex club, recorded the names and particulars of all her celebrity clients. She’s convinced that some bad cop pounced on it and spirited it away. But which bad cop? Billy, surviving the shooting that left his partner and his lover dead only to find himself accused of murder on the strength of forensic evidence, is helpless to defend himself because he’s lost all memory of what happened in that bedroom. Will he recover it in time to save himself and finger the perp?
Most readers will be ahead of the twin investigators in identifying the guilty party. But the mystery is authentic, the lead-up genuinely suspenseful, and the leading characters and situations more memorable than Patterson’s managed in quite a while. Co-author Ellis is definitely a keeper.Pub Date: March 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-27388-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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