When the Retimer has a mission and an enemy, explosive action rapidly follows.
The seventh in Angliss’ (In the State I’m In, 2015, etc.) espionage series finds its Australian protagonist on assignment to thwart an African drug lord while falling in love with his agent-aide.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation sends Luthan Fennes and Priscilla Cassidy to Mozambique to take down known drug lord Col. Saidi Rusere. The two operatives already have a connection: Fennes, aka the Retimer, trained Priscilla when she was a recruit. But before their latest mission even gets under way, it’s evident that the two are in love. Once in Africa, an ASIO-sanctioned car bombing fails to kill Rusere, who blames the attempted assassination on his cousin, Mozambican President José Martinho. A subsequent sniper incident upgrades Rusere to general, and he plans a coup. He also captures the agents after their covers are blown, but Fennes and Priscilla escape, determined to make the next assassination attempt a success. Rusere’s coup seems to involve setting off devastating explosions, including a bomb at Cahora Bassa Dam, the sixth largest in the world. There are implications, however, of something bigger at play: according to rumors, Rusere has an identical twin, while either the general or Martinho has hands on a “superweapon.” Despite the title, the author’s latest offering is more spy novel than romance. The action, in fact, rarely lets up; there are endless battles with bullets and grenades, as well as chase sequences, one on surf bikes and another in the snow-covered Swiss Alps. The couple’s relationship, meanwhile, is largely effective, a reprieve from numerous characters trying to kill one another. It’s likewise amusing when, for example, the two engage in a kissing session and Priscilla soon thereafter sports an assault rifle. Fennes’ machismo can be overbearing; at one point he notes that Priscilla in peril needed “the physical shot in the arm that was a man.” The narrative, too, is occasionally verbose, like Fennes speaking into “the dashboard hands-free digital touchpad smartphone link.” But when Angliss describes scuffles, his prose soars; a highlight is Fennes and Rusere “interlocked in one another’s arms, each man punching and kicking his foe, freefalling from the aircraft.”
When the Retimer has a mission and an enemy, explosive action rapidly follows.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5120-6823-8
Page Count: 398
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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