This smashing espionage tale kicks off what promises to be a smart, indelible series.
In this debut novel, a CIA attorney tries to elicit a murder confession from the man who recruited him into the agency.
When a bomb blows up Charlie March and his yacht in 1991, the dying CIA officer in his last few words utters the name Nathan. The agency quickly sends legal counsel Russell Aiken to interview Nathan Muir at the Florida island home he rents every September. The two men have a strong connection: Muir recruited Aiken years ago. As for March, he recruited Muir from the Marine Corps in 1950s South Korea. Muir, who claims he didn’t kill March, talks about working for his mentor, including hunting a spy in Korea. Yet Muir’s history teems with sordid details and secrets, from his reputed discovery that March had “gone bad” to his fallout with Tom Bishop, another CIA recruit and field officer. But it turns out that Aiken has also been involved in some unsavory deeds, such as using his skills to help Muir jump legal hurdles. As Muir’s decadeslong chronology inches closer to what Aiken hopes is a confession, the CIA operations officer has a bevy of surprises for the attorney. TV/film writer Beckner’s riveting series opener takes characters from a Hollywood script he penned—the Tony Scott–directed Spy Game (2001). The author packs this epic narrative with plot turns and real-world events, such as the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The cast is also multilayered, especially Muir, Aiken, and Bishop. Aiken, for example, has struggled with alcoholism and just found out his wife is cheating on him. The novel, primarily encompassing the crucial interview, is relentlessly tense, as Muir knows things that should stay hush-hush and certainly tells lies at least some of the time. He’s both debonair and chilling and drops such memorable one-liners as “We’d go where the Cold War blows.” The open ending offers a thorough resolution as well as more than one shocker.
This smashing espionage tale kicks off what promises to be a smart, indelible series.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985597400
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Montrose Station Press LLC
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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