by Max Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 20, 2015
An engrossing thriller for readers who like their spies to be pragmatic but rigorous.
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A Scandinavian intelligence officer stumbles upon a murderous global conspiracy to secure Arctic oil and gas resources in Morgan’s debut thriller.
As the story opens, Norwegian Police Security Service senior intelligence officer Magnus Ose meets with energy company executive Finn Aspen, who says a blackmailer is threatening him to obtain information. But Magnus learns very little before a sniper kills the executive right in front of him. He then checks on another asset, Alf Evenson, only to find that he’s just as dead. He connects both men to a classified project known as “Black Ice,” in which five experts developed new technology for safe Arctic drilling. Magnus suspects a coverup involving China and Russia, who may be collaborating to control the region’s energy resources. A woman named Miranda Hobb is the only Black Ice expert still alive, and Magnus tries to protect her as he tracks down the people behind the international murder spree. This spy thriller electrifies its pages with characters from around the world, including a Danish colonel and enigmatic French national, and treks to multiple countries, including Belgium and Switzerland. Morgan devotes most of the book to scenes of espionage—Magnus poring over computer files, agents monitoring or trailing people—but he certainly doesn’t skimp on action sequences. At one point, for example, Magnus pursues a sniper, and the confrontation is neither easy nor quick; meanwhile, Magnus’ colleague, Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent Max Dufour, struggles to keep Miranda clear of gunfire. Magnus is memorable as a vulnerable hero who actually feels “aches and pains” following physical exertion. The introduction of a bundle of new characters just past the book’s halfway point is initially jarring, but it does open up the conspiracy plot and show how far-reaching it truly is. Morgan is primarily concerned with showing Magnus meticulously pulling the conspiracy apart, so a couple of late plot twists aren’t as surprising as perhaps intended. The story’s thrills, however, are seemingly endless, as dangerous villains threaten Magnus’ family, and one baddie is revealed to have a frightening amount of power.
An engrossing thriller for readers who like their spies to be pragmatic but rigorous.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1502778550
Page Count: 280
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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