An engaging read that offers a novel spin on the notion that you can’t go home again.
A military thriller about the travails of a secret soldier who attempts to put her family first.
At the heart of Lujan’s debut novel is Norma Veurr, who helped found Atropos, a top-secret, black-ops government agency, many years ago. Despite vowing never to come back to the espionage game, she agrees to do so in 2009 after two decades away; however, she has a sense of impending doom after her solo mission, and she reflects back over how she got to this point. First, her mind travels back three days to her visit to her small hometown of Martinsburg, West Virginia. LeRoy, the town sheriff, still suspects her in the murder of her father, Mackenzie, who forged Norma into the weapon she became. Then her mind drifts back further to meeting her husband, Alex, who was part of a team that rescued her from a mission gone awry. Next, she recalls the dramatic birth of her son, Alexander—the reason she left Atropos 20 years ago. Lastly, she thinks about a fateful night when Alexander visited his grandfather, which led to Norma’s return to Atropos. Later, Alexander joins Atropos and rapidly ascends to leadership; when his team is captured, he must rely on an unexpected rescuer. In this volume, Lujan colorfully tells Norma’s story from her miserable childhood onward. She’s a well-developed character, as are the most important people in her life. The author elaborates on why Norma makes the choices she does, which is often to protect her loved ones. Atropos is certainly an important element in the book but not as much as readers may expect; Lujan writes more about what led Norma to and away from Atropos and less about its actual missions. The narrative, which slips back and forth through time, can be a bit confusing, as can the fact that Norma’s husband and son share similar names. However, Norma’s exhilarating tale is worth the effort.
An engaging read that offers a novel spin on the notion that you can’t go home again.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5320-9062-2
Page Count: 166
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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