by Michael Angliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 11, 2014
The Retimer is at his best in the field, and genre fans will gladly follow the spy who leaves behind nothing but bullet...
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Angliss’ (Mrs America: Gunluv, 2014, etc.) latest thriller in the Retimer series finds recurring Aussie intelligence agent Luthan Fennes searching for his brother, who doesn’t seem to have returned from his space tour.
Luthan doesn’t understand brother Reginald Dolsen’s shelling out his life’s savings to join a tour of the International Space Station. But Luthan, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation operative better known as the Retimer, is understandably concerned when the tourists aren’t there to greet loved ones upon their return to Earth. CIA agents tell Luthan that Dolsen has been kidnapped, but later, after Luthan ignores the agency’s warnings to stop looking for his brother, they admit that Dolsen is still in space. He’s been infected with a virus called Sifersin and effectively quarantined in the ISS. Sifersin may have made its way to Earth, courtesy of Dr. Leroy Lloyd-Jones, who, along with his brother Arthur, was a passenger on the latest tour. Luthan heads to London to find the scientist and a possible link to terrorists, hopefully saving Dolsen in the process. In spite of its sci-fi premise, Angliss’ novel stays true to the series and keeps its hero’s feet firmly on the ground for most of the story. Readers who’ve read any of the previous books will recognize some recurring themes: bomb-loving terrorists; car chases and sequences riddled with bullets; and the Retimer’s willingness to kill, including CIA agents—but only if they try to kill him first. Even a tennis match between Luthan and Leroy plays out like an action scene before being interrupted by an assassination attempt. At one point, Luthan mocks James Bond, citing the Retimer’s employment of “genuine, not cinematic, spy tradecraft” (this is soon after he’s used a jet pack to escape). The 007 inspiration is unmistakable, and Luthan, under an alias, can’t resist introducing himself as “Bach. James Bach.” There are some affecting moments early on with Luthan’s wife, Valerie, and their three children. Suspecting perpetually absent Luthan of infidelity, she even does something unheard of so that cops will find her hubby for her—a potentially interesting subplot that’s unfortunately dropped and never picked back up.
The Retimer is at his best in the field, and genre fans will gladly follow the spy who leaves behind nothing but bullet holes.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500507855
Page Count: 262
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 29, 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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