A functional Vietnam-era thriller.
In this sequel, two American operatives discover an assassination plot.
Hawk and Cowboy, a pair of veteran snipers and best friends who recently served in Vietnam, are now working special missions for none other than the president of the United States. After tangling with some drug dealers in Mexico, the guys are back in Southeast Asia—in Laos, specifically, though they may have to sneak across borders. After an attempted jungle incursion leads to an ambush, Hawk suspects that they were set up, but by whom? The covert operations in which they are involved are all but anonymous: “No one in Laos kept any type of identification on them, so they had been given the collective ID of MACV-SOG team one. No names. They took turns being number one and number two. No one went by their right name in Laos.” They find out that their presence in the area is seen as a threat to the heroin trade operating out of the so-called “Golden Triangle,” in which the CIA is heavily involved. While on an assassination mission, Hawk and Cowboy uncover a plan to eliminate the top CIA official in the region—a scheme to be carried out by an elite Cuban sniper who has come to Asia to kill Americans. With the help of an old friend from their Mexican adventures named Liz, Hawk and Cowboy seek to protect U.S. interests, but they may have finally met their match in the form of this mysterious Cuban sniper. Shellenbergar’s (Recover and Terminate, 2018) prose is muscular and exact, demonstrating a persuasive grasp of the particulars of military life and jungle operations. He is adept at writing combat scenes without losing readers in all the commotion: “When the grenades blew and the wounded started yelling, a lone NVA came running from the jungle toward Hawk, his SKS level and firing. He was missing each shot as he ran toward Hawk. The enemy’s bayonet was pointed at Hawk’s chest.” The characters are a bit clichéd and the plot is more than a little ridiculous, but the author has managed to vividly reproduce the tone and set pieces of a 1980s action movie in novel form.
A functional Vietnam-era thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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