Nonetheless: satisfying effort from a high talent, even when he’s entangled in his own rigging.
Most complicated yet from the writer of sea-faring thrillers (Sea Hunter, 2003, etc.).
Boat bum Aiden Page seems a standard Garrison hero: fortysomething and ruggedly good-looking, he handles charters around the island of St. Martin and, due to unresolved conflicts in his past, remains wary of female entanglements. This past conflict, though, is a doozy: once chief financial officer at a small investment bank, Page, on 9/11, was in the World Trade Center office he shared with his sleazy CEO brother Charlie. Both survived the terrorist attack, but Page chose to let his wife and 15-year old daughter Morgan believe him dead. When he glimpses his newspaper obit, though, he comes unhinged and calls his daughter, who shares the Page family enthusiasm for sailboats. Garrison leaves us guessing what the two talk about as he piles up an unwieldy backstory. We learn that Page had had an affair with brother Charlie’s wife, did some very peculiar investing for a tug boat company work that literally blew up—when a barge loaded with dynamite exploded—and that brother Charlie, who once taught bin Laden’s fighters terrorist techniques in Afghanistan, is also alive and has fled to Blind Man Island, a South Pacific refuge owned by Henry Hong, the shadowy Hong Kong businessman and funder of Page’s bank who’s married to evil Jin-Shil, North Korean secret agent. The story doesn’t really begin until feisty Morgan, visiting her grandfather in Santa Barbara, steals a boat and sails to meet her father at Blind Man Island. Then things soar as Morgan masters the magnificently dangerous, character-building lessons that only the sea—or incipient romance with a Tongan native—can teach. Garrison’s overblown, plot-driven high jinks, culminating in the discovery of the superweapon in Hong’s island paradise, will turn pages but little else.
Nonetheless: satisfying effort from a high talent, even when he’s entangled in his own rigging.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-008169-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.
Three siblings who have been out of touch for more than 20 years grapple with their unsettling childhoods, but when the youngest inherits the family home, all are drawn back together.
At the age of 25, Libby Jones learns she has inherited a large London house that was held in a trust left to her by her birthparents. When she visits the lawyer, she is shocked to find out that she was put up for adoption when she was 10 months old after her parents died in the house in an apparent suicide pact with an unidentified man and that she has an older brother and sister who were teenagers at the time of their parents' deaths and haven't been seen since. Meanwhile, in alternating narratives, we're introduced to Libby's sister, Lucy Lamb, who's on the verge of homelessness with her two children in the south of France, and her brother, Henry Lamb, who's attempting to recall the last few disturbing years with his parents during which they lost their wealth and were manipulated into letting friends move into their home. These friends included the controlling but charismatic David Thomsen, who moved his own wife and two children into the rooms upstairs. Henry also remembers his painful adolescent confusion as he became wildly infatuated with Phineas, David’s teenage son. Meanwhile, Libby connects with Miller Roe, the journalist who covered the story about her family, and the pair work together to find her brother and sister, determine what happened when she was an infant, and uncover who has recently been staying in the vacant house waiting for Libby to return. As Jewell (Watching You, 2018, etc.) moves back and forth from the past to the present, the narratives move swiftly toward convergence in her signature style, yet with the exception of Lucy’s story, little suspense is built up and the twists can’t quite make up for the lack of deep characters and emotionally weighty moments.
This thriller is taut and fast-paced but lacks compelling protagonists.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9010-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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