by Mike Bond ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 2013
A high-octane story rife with action, from U.S. streets to Guatemalan jungles.
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In Bond’s (The Last Savanna, 2013, etc.) military thriller, a former U.S. Army pilot witnesses soldiers slaughtering a village in Guatemala and makes himself a target when he starts asking questions.
Vietnam vet Joe Murphy is earning money by flying to Guatemala to pick up a load of marijuana. But before he can get his plane back in the air, the Guatemalan army attacks, and Murphy flees into the jungle. The pilot, injured and taken in by villagers, evades the army again but watches as they massacre the village. When Murphy makes it back to the States, he goes to the press with his story, but there’s evidently no media interest. A short article, however, is enough to catch the attention of Col. Lyman, who was in Guatemala on a CIA op and who’s been obsessively pursuing Murphy, blaming him for the murder of another CIA insert, Kit Gallagher—a death that Murphy heard while hiding in the jungle. Murphy is now dodging killers, including cops, in his native country, hoping to learn what the CIA was doing in Guatemala and determined to go back for Dona Villalobos, a doctor he fell for during his recovery. Bond’s kinetic novel abounds with intense scenes—Murphy trekking through the spider- and snake-laden forest with a broken arm; Dona and a group of guerrillas raiding an Army base for medicines, a plan that has unexpectedly bloody results. But even without someone running or ducking bullets, characters are rarely given a chance to stop and take a breath. The adept Dona simultaneously tends to Murphy, who’s aggravated his injury, and a pregnant woman who needs a cesarean section. Bond also includes elements of mystery; readers are aware of the CIA’s presence in Guatemala but learn most things right along with the protagonist. The characters are fully limned, though none is more delectably warped than Lyman. His fixation on Murphy borders on psychotic and leads Lyman to enact seriously disturbing deeds. Not surprisingly, the novel ends with a shock, one that might have a few readers gasping.
A high-octane story rife with action, from U.S. streets to Guatemalan jungles.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1627040105
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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