Van Rooy, the Canadian writer who died earlier this year, offers the second, and presumably last, installment in the rambunctious saga of an ex-con who insists against all the evidence that he wants to go straight.
It’s not easy to stay on the straight and narrow when your most adventurous job is as a babysitter. Just ask Montgomery Haaviko (An Ordinary Decent Criminal, 2010), who’s trying to make a decent life for his wife Claire and their baby son Fred in sunny Manitoba. The provocations to backsliding are considerable. Claire, who has designs on the real-estate market, drags Monty along to hear a pitch from Marie Blue Duck about smuggling illegals into Canada. Naturally, Monty doesn’t want to get involved, but at length he agrees to throw in with Marie. Before they can launch their enterprise, however, Monty has to purge their little cooperative of Greg Whitefox, the smuggler/thief/lowlife who’s all too likely to bring trouble down on their heads. And he has to handle Samantha Ritchot, the meth dealer Greg told about Marie’s plan, and her legion of thugs. And he has to clean out the crack house that’s sullying his own neighborhood. And, once it’s cleaned out, he has to make sure it stays clean. Mostly, though, he has to deal with his old friend Smiley, a fellow con who’s turned up on his doorstep demanding shelter, a piece of the action and, just possibly, a pound of flesh on behalf of Samantha. Don’t be fooled by Monty’s casual tone or throwaway wisecracks. He is one tough hombre, and his story is fast, brutal and sad, only because it may be the last we hear of him.
Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-60630-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Categories: THRILLER
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BOOK REVIEW
Rumors of lost Egyptian treasure spark high adventure in this 17th in the NUMA series featuring oceanographer Kurt Austin and his crew (Sea of Greed, 2018, etc.).
Over 3,000 years ago, grave robbers sail away with loot from a pharaoh’s tomb. In 1927, Jake Melbourne and his plane disappear in his attempt at a trans-Atlantic flight. In the present day, arms merchants known as the Bloodstone Group have taken to stealing antiquities. They are looking for a “treasure both vast and glorious” that hieroglyphics say was shipped down the Nile and out of Egypt, perhaps even west across the Atlantic. (Holy scurvy! That must’ve been a lot of hard rowing!) The criminals are known to MI5 as “very dangerous people" and "merchants selling death.” Perfectly willing to kill everyone in their way, they are aided by mechanical crows and Fydor and Xandra, nasty sibling assassins jointly called the Toymaker. Such are the foes faced by Austin and his team from the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Of course, Austin has no interest in profit; he will gladly leave the ancient riches wherever they are. Action arrives early and often, and the failed pre-Lindbergh flight fits in neatly. Cussler and Brown concoct a nifty plot with disparate, sometimes over-the-top twists that will make even hardcore adventure fans say “Wow!” Expect claustrophobic gunfights, aerial combat, a life-threatening flood, messages from the dead, coffins of gold—and a vintage classic car, because why not? “We’re going to steal the greatest deposit of Egyptian treasure the world has ever known,” brags the evil mastermind. But he’ll have to climb over the series hero’s dead body first, which—no plot spoiler here—ain’t gonna happen.
This is fast-paced, nonstop fun. Cussler fans will gobble it up.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08308-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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