Quintessential DeMille: action-adventure flavored with double-dealing and covert conspiracy.
Prolific thriller author DeMille (Night Fall, 2004, etc.) sends his NYPD detective John Corey into Yemen in pursuit of Bulus ibn al-Darwish, an Al-Qaida operative known as al-Numair, the Panther.
The Panther, a first-generation Yemeni immigrant from Perth Amboy gone bad, was in on the USS Cole attack while the ship refueled in Aden’s harbor. Now, the Panther lurks in Yemen’s unstable tribal lands. Corey and FBI agent wife Kate Mayfield serve in New York City on the Anti-Terrorist Task Force. The FBI wants the couple in Yemen to hunt the Panther. Corey and Mayfield are reluctant, especially because Corey was there earlier investigating the Cole bombing, and he knows that Yemen is a near-anarchic hotbed of terror and tribal wars exacerbated by the brutal Yemeni Political Security Organization and corrupt National Security Bureau. He also suspects they’re bait, primarily because Corey killed the Lion, a Libyan terrorist, and earned a slot on Al-Qaida’s kill list. And Corey is suspicious of any CIA involvement. Kate once killed a rogue CIA agent and “inadvertently messed up a CIA plan to turn most of the Mideast into a nuclear wasteland.” Corey thinks a mission called Operation Clean Sweep could disguise CIA revenge as friendly casualties. While it takes DeMille 600-plus pages to unreel the complex, double-dealing, fog-of-war tale, his narrative moves rapidly and sparkles with interesting historical tidbits about Yemen, Noah’s Ark and Arsh Bilqis, the throne of Sheba. DeMille’s CIA agents are old-school William Buckley-types; the patrician Buckminster Harris and the crazy patrician scion Chet Morgan. Paul Brenner, embassy DSS chief and two-tour Vietnam veteran, is a competent third wheel, and PSO Col. Hakim proves a useful foil.
Quintessential DeMille: action-adventure flavored with double-dealing and covert conspiracy.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-446-58084-7
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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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