Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Greaney could dial back the bloodletting a notch and still have an exciting story.
Futuristic robots take center stage in the Gray Man’s latest bloody adventure.
Courtland “the Gray Man” Gentry and Zoya Zakharova are lovers trying to enjoy a peaceful hideaway by Guatemala’s beautiful Lake Atitlán when a tiny drone with facial recognition capabilities tracks them down. A worldwide manhunt is underway for them, and Russia has a capture-or-kill order out on Zoya. For those just tuning in to the series, by the way, the twosome used to be mortal enemies. Now one of the planet’s most infamous killers for hire is after them, an evildoer named Scott Kincaid, aka Lancer. But on to the main plot: Multibillionaire Anton Hinton is building a lethal autonomous weapon driven by artificial intelligence. Strangely, over a 34-hour period, 10 people involved in AI and robotics have been murdered around the world. Hinton insists he’s just trying to bring some sanity into the world: With these machines engaging in any necessary fighting and doing so with perfect judgment, human wars could become a thing of the past. Wait a sec, just looking for the perfect cliche. Oh yes: What could possibly go wrong? Greaney, a terrific action writer, has jumped the shark (oops, another cliche; it won’t happen again, sorry) with a science fiction setup involving bomb-wielding hexacopters, rifle-wielding robot dogs, and a superintelligent creature named Cyrus who’s controlled by 800 IBM mainframe computers. So who will get control of this technology? China, maybe. Or, as series regular Zack Hightower says as he wipes his bloody nose, “America…. Fuck, yeah.” In a scene emblematic of the story’s chaos, Zoya lies in a dead man’s blood as the man’s left leg is hit, “and it snapped and shattered the bone there, bits of meat spraying in all directions.” And, in a contemplative moment with Zoya, Court says he just wants to be with her in peace, while he wonders if he’d “ever be able to stop killing motherfuckers who deserved to die.” Indeed, violence is the point of his life.
Greaney could dial back the bloodletting a notch and still have an exciting story.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593548141
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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