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
If you love good crime writing but aren’t familiar with Winslow’s work, read this trilogy in order.
The dramatic conclusion to the trilogy about two New England crime families begun in City on Fire (2022) and City of Dreams (2023).
Near the end of his journey, multimillionaire Danny Ryan watches a casino implode in a mushroom cloud of dust and muses about his life’s implosions: “The cancer that killed his wife, the depression that destroyed his love, the moral rot that took his soul.” Danny is from Providence, Rhode Island, and desperately tried to leave his criminal life behind him. But using a ton of ill-gotten gains, he invests heavily in Las Vegas properties. Congress is conducting an investigation into gambling that could destroy his casino business and even land him in jail. An FBI agent plans to take Danny down for major sins he’d like to repent for. Meanwhile, can he make peace with his enemies? Nope, doesn’t look like it. Even if the parties involved want to put the past behind them, the trouble is that they don’t trust each other. Is Vern Winegard setting Dan up? Is Dan setting Vern up? “Trust? Trust is children waiting for Santa Claus.” So what could have been a “Kumbaya,” nobody-wants-to-read-this story turns into a grisly bloodletting filled with language that would set Sister Mary Margaret’s wimple on fire—figuratively speaking, as she’s not in the book. But the Catholic reference is appropriate: Two of the many colorful characters of ill repute are known as the Altar Boys, serving “Last Communion” to their victims. On the law-abiding side and out of the line of fire is an ex-nun-turned-prosecutor nicknamed Attila the Nun, who’s determined to bring justice for a gory matricide. (Rhode Island really had such a person, by the way.) Finally, the prose is just fun: A friend warns Dan about Allie Licata: “In a world of sick fucks, even the sick fucks think Licata’s a sick fuck.” A couple of things to note: This not only ends the trilogy, but it also closes out the author’s career, as he has said he’ll write no more novels.
If you love good crime writing but aren’t familiar with Winslow’s work, read this trilogy in order.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063079472
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PROFILES
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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