by Olen Steinhauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2006
Cool and cerebral crime thriller, full of political nuance and bathed in irony.
In 1975, clashing cops investigate the explosion of a Turkish passenger plane.
The story is told in short chapters from the perspective of multiple characters. Three emerge: Peter Husak, a Czech student in the eye of the revolutionary storm in 1968; Gavra Noukas, a young member of the secret police of an unnamed USSR satellite state; and Katja Drdova, an even younger homicide detective in the same country. Both Gavra and Katja are called in to investigate when, on April 23, 1975, Turkish Airlines Flight 54 blows up in mid-air after being hijacked by the Army of the Liberation, an Armenian terrorist group. Katja’s colleague Libarid Terzian was aboard the plane and cannot be immediately cleared of suspicion because of his Armenian heritage. This link brings Katja into the probe. Major Brano Sev, the hero of Steinhauer’s 36 Yalta Boulevard (2005), here appears to be a bluff bureaucrat, guiding his protégé Gavra, a closeted homosexual with a healthy libido. Indeed Brano, whom Gavra calls “the old man,” feeds his underlings (and the reader) bits of evidence piecemeal, challenging both to put the disparate pieces together. The saga of Peter Husak, ensnared in Prague Spring, runs as a parallel narrative to the terrorism plot until, late in the story, his alternate identity and its relation to the other protagonists is revealed. A suspicious German émigré leads to a list of likely terrorists, and Katja uncovers a message left at their hotel by a young woman passenger named Zrinka Martrich. The scarcity of official information about Zrinka raises red flags; Gavra visits a doctor who treated Zrinka for mental illness as well as her charismatic brother, with whom he later enters into a volatile affair. When Gavra returns to the doctor, he finds him murdered, a chilling indication that he’s on the right track.
Cool and cerebral crime thriller, full of political nuance and bathed in irony.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-33204-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Nora Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2003
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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