An entertaining page-turner that mixes punchy shootouts with resonant soul-searching.
A reporter confronts terrorists, the Mafia, and fertility issues in Ebner’s thriller-series starter.
Teagan Penn is a 37-year-old Seattle journalist with a prominent facial dog-bite scar and a talent for drawing out celebrities in soul-baring interviews. Her own soul is troubled by her and her husband Todd’s inability to conceive a child and by news of nearly daily atrocities committed by KIL, an Islamic terrorist group. When KIL starts kidnapping and enslaving girls in the Middle East, Teagan’s frustrated maternal instincts prod her to launch a personal rescue mission of her own. She strikes a deal with a shadowy crime lord named Roman to raise $12 million, which he is to use to mount a mercenary operation called Project Rebound to rescue the girls. The caper goes awry before it even gets going, and after Teagan goes to Paris to untangle it, her hotel is attacked by KIL commandos bent on slaughtering all the guests. When she gets on the phone with Roman, he implies that he sent the shooters to murder her under cover of a massacre. After gunning down two terrorists herself and evacuating the hotel, Teagan is approached by CIA counterterrorism agent Robert Lexington, who drags her into an even murkier imbroglio. Lexington is secretly working for Italy’s Una Banca crime family, who want to kill Roman for betraying them; if Teagan assassinates Roman, he promises he’ll shield her from criminal charges for Project Rebound. This plot thickens further when Teagan gets unexpected news that changes her life. Soon, however, she sets off to hunt Roman down on the other side of the world.
This first installment of Ebner’s series suffers from an ungainly structure, with the narrative lurching from a storyline about improbably omnipotent terrorists to a different tale of implausibly omnipotent gangsters in its second half. Fortunately, much of the action is well staged and effective, especially Teagan’s stalking of Roman, which unfolds in unflashy scenes that highlight her doggedness before a blunt, brutal climax. Ebner gives his characters rich backstories and complex motivations that are reminiscent of a John le Carré novel, with Lexington intriguingly emerging as both victim and antagonist. Throughout, the author renders Teagan’s experiences in vivid prose that captures both the intimacy of motherhood (“After feeding her son, his little head would snuggle between her chin and shoulder…she could hear his every little breath and feel his tiny heart beating throughout his whole body”) and the jagged tensions of violence: “Teagan took a deep breath—ignoring the stabbing-like echo of the attacker’s assault rifle—stayed focused, exhaled and pulled the trigger.” In other passages, he evokes a George Smiley–esque mood of painful disillusionment: “ ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’ a supervisor had told him. But omelettes aren’t made from week old rotting bodies.” Overall, Teagan proves to be an appealing hero with depth and determination—readers will enjoy rooting for her. An entertaining page-turner that mixes punchy shootouts with resonant soul-searching.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780993061318
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Pen and Picture
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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