Perfect summer beach reading, with or without margaritas, full of Glock-and-boat action.
DeMille (The Panther, 2012, etc.) follows former NYPD detective John Corey, the bane of Middle Eastern terrorists, after he’s contracted to the Diplomatic Surveillance Group.
Corey’s sardonic voice drives this adventure, as he and his team surveil Russian U.N. delegate and SVR Col. Vasily Petrov. There’s reason to pay attention: SVR equals Russian CIA. After Corey’s bounced around alphabet-soup counterterror groups—and followed too few rules—Corey’s bosses think the tamer DSG will keep him out of trouble, but the assignment’s causing marital friction. His wife, FBI Agent Kate Mayfield, remains with the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, and her boss has the hots for her. Tailing a "dip" or not, Corey’s got cop instincts. He knows something bad is afoot when Petrov and his SVR companions motor to a Russian oligarch’s Long Island mansion and then sneak away on a pleasure boat. Corey doesn’t trust Russians, noting that "when I compared them to the Islamist I had spent years following and investigating, I had no doubt who was the most dangerous." Good instincts: Petrov’s supposed to "destroy Lower Manhattan and destroy all evidence of who had perpetrated the attack." The Russian is a desperate dude with daddy issues: his SMERSH-veteran father, a recipient of the Order of Lenin, messaged, "Come home in glory. Or do not come home." Complications arise when Buckminster Harris, a double-secret CIA-type, shows up. Harris left Corey to die in Yemen. And Corey’s supposed trainee partner, Tess Faraday? She’s a Harris-controlled undercover State Department Intelligence agent. In a plot as high-speed as the SAFE-boat Corey uses to chase Petrov, DeMille offers a less-verbose version of Clancy’s Sum of All Fears, all while rendering Long Island familiarly and adding sparks between Corey and Tess.
Perfect summer beach reading, with or without margaritas, full of Glock-and-boat action.Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-446-58085-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Not much of a thriller or a mystery, but illuminating about the ways in which the law works and doesn’t.
The fifth in the best-selling Lincoln Lawyer series.
A former newspaper reporter, Connelly (The Reversal, 2010, etc.) has moved into the territory dominated by former lawyers John Grisham and Scott Turow in this series of novels featuring defense attorney Mickey Haller, a hustler whose office is the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car and whose approach to the legal system prizes pragmatism over idealism. For Haller, there was a “fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client’s favor. They weren’t always the same thing.” Doing a good job as a defense lawyer sometimes finds him at odds with a law-abiding society, including his estranged daughter, devastated when one of his clients freed on a technicality caused a tragic death. “I had to have faith that Hayley would eventually come to realize that the world was not black and white,” explains the protagonist. “That it was gray and the gray area was where her father dwelled.” Such prose belabors the obvious, and the frequent invocation of the title (in reference to juries in particular and to all others who would pass judgment on Haller) is heavy-handed. Yet the narrative momentum sustains itself, as Haller investigates a case that doesn’t look like it will change his daughter’s opinion of him. He’s defending a cyberpimp (a sign of the times; he designs websites) accused of murdering a prostitute who not only had a close relationship with Haller, but who had recommended him to her suspected killer if he ever needed a lawyer. Pretty quickly, it becomes plain who the good guys and bad guys are (by the standards of the series), with few surprises along the way. There is also a perfunctory romance, a few issues on the table and some plot developments that suggest that this isn’t the end of the series.
Not much of a thriller or a mystery, but illuminating about the ways in which the law works and doesn’t.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-06951-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A promising start, but McMahon could do more with less.
Southern gothic mingles with modern noir in this well-intentioned mashup.
P.T. Marsh, a sergeant in the Mason Falls, Georgia, police department, has lost his way. After the deaths of his wife and son he has fallen into depression, drinking his way through his days, no longer Mason Falls’ best detective. Late one night he tries to help Crimson, a strip club performer, whose partner, Virgil Rowe, abuses her, but he soon finds himself in more complicated trouble. He beats and threatens Rowe, goes home, and wakes up to find Rowe has been murdered. Has Marsh killed him? He doesn’t know, but things get really sticky when Rowe becomes the most likely suspect in another murder that had taken place earlier that evening. The victim in that earlier death was a black teenager who was tortured and lynched. Following up on the racist murder leads Marsh to a white supremacist group and then further into history, revealing a pattern of deaths that reach back to the “old” South and exposing a shadowy cabal still in operation today. Historic documents contain the names of families still powerful in Georgia and hint at horrifying rituals. Marsh, who believes he can genuinely number himself among the unprejudiced white people—he has an African-American partner and his wife was also African-American—becomes again a "good detective" in opposing this powerful form of racism. Marsh is a likable character, but he has too much to do here: solve Rowe's murder to exonerate himself; rehabilitate himself and his reputation on the force; and expose and then fight the cabal. And while the persistence of racism is undeniable, the shape it takes in this novel is so sensationalized it may distract from the more pedestrian and pressing forms that are always around us.
A promising start, but McMahon could do more with less.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53553-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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