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
The indomitable, quick-on-the-draw Lizbeth remains an irresistible heroine, and Harris proves she still has the magic touch.
In the second installment of Harris’ weird Western series set in an alternate former United States (after An Easy Death, 2018), gunslinger/bodyguard for hire Lizbeth “Gunnie” Rose must accompany a mysterious crate to its destination, but things go terribly wrong.
A long train ride east to the country of Dixie isn’t 19-year-old Lizbeth’s idea of a good time, but it is a job, and she needs it, especially since her last job left her with a long recovery and no crew. Her new troupe, the Lucky Crew, seems competent enough, and when Lizbeth spots some suspicious folks on the train, she’s pretty sure they’re about to be tested. A shootout precedes an explosion that engulfs the train. Someone must really want the Lucky Crew’s cargo. Lizbeth has been shot, her crew has been decimated, and the contents of the crate are gone, but she’s still got a job to do. When a blast from Lizbeth’s past—Eli Savarov, a grigori, or Russian wizard—shows up, Lizbeth discovers that he’s in search of whomever hired the Lucky Crew to deliver the crate. Lizbeth agrees to take a job as his bodyguard, and the two, posing as a married couple (it’s only proper) poke around the Louisiana town of Sally for clues that will lead them to the chest. They quickly realize the town is in racial turmoil: Slavery doesn’t technically exist, but it might as well considering the backward attitudes of the townsfolk and their shabby treatment of Sally’s black citizens. It all seems to lead to a powerful family that holds the town in its thrall, and, of course, the explosive contents of that troublesome crate. Lizbeth and Eli spend quite a bit of time on old-fashioned sleuthing (and, delightfully, between the sheets), but the action ratchets up exponentially in the surprising last half. Lizbeth is a no-nonsense, dryly funny narrator, and while this installment lacks a bit of the spark of the first book, it’s still a shoot’em-up, rollicking ride.
The indomitable, quick-on-the-draw Lizbeth remains an irresistible heroine, and Harris proves she still has the magic touch.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4814-9495-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.
Now that he’s revisited and deepened the tissue of double-crosses that put him on the map with George Smiley, le Carré (A Legacy of Spies, 2017, etc.), evergreen at 87, turns to an equally hapless new hero in the age of Trump and Brexit.
“I’m a field man,” says Nat, a Secret Intelligence Service agent, “not a desk jockey, not a social carer.” Convinced at 47 that his years running spies throughout Europe are over, he accepts one last assignment as the only alternative to being put out to pasture for good: assuming command of Haven, the London substation he describes to his unenthusiastic wife, human rights lawyer Prudence, as “a Mickey Mouse outfit” where his job will be “either to get it on its feet or speed it on its way to the graveyard.” No sooner has Nat sunk into this forgettable ambit than three disquieting developments arise. Florence, a probationer who’s his nominal second-in-command, angrily quits over the unexplained cancellation of a project she’s designed, spearheaded, and pitched to the powers that be. Sergei Kusnetsev, a Russian defector who’s become a sleeper agent for Her Majesty’s Government, is contacted by Anastasia, a Russian agent who presumably either wants to put him to work, if she trusts him, or to expose him, if she doesn’t. And Ed Shannon, the much-younger researcher who joined Nat’s athletic club in order to play badminton with him and vent about the folly of Brexit and the rise of neo-Nazism in the States, suddenly appears in an alarming new role. Seeing the world as he knows it—not the new world order or the special relationship, but his own faded patch of it—threatened from every corner, Nat, determined to assert himself one last time, hatches a rickety plan to keep the pot from boiling over.
A tragicomic salute to both the recuperative powers of its has-been hero and the remarkable career of its nonpareil author.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-7887-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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