An intriguing, complex hero emerges in this riveting espionage tale.
The past reaches out and grabs an ex–intelligence agent in this debut spy thriller.
Dalton Drake, a former Canadian Security Investigation Service agent–turned–private eye, is drinking after work at his favorite Winnipeg bar when a stranger delivers the message “Ice Castle is falling. Find Farhad.” He also learns that his former MI6 colleague Alexander Marshall-Page has died under suspicious circumstances. By the next morning, the messenger is also dead. Soon, Dalton gets summoned to Washington, D.C., where he is quickly assigned to Operation Blackwater, which seeks to recover nuclear material stolen by terrorists. Dalton teams up with MI5’s Kenton Stone, Royal Air Force Second Lt. Kathleen Baker, and, later, his long-lost former lover Beverley Foster. They’re chasing terrorists Layla Farhad, who Dalton thought was dead, and her lover, Hassan Taheri, who are smuggling their radioactive prize first by cargo ship and then by submarine. In the background of this dogged pursuit through Africa and Europe, scientists work with the military to develop alternate defenses in case Blackwater fails. All involved also have to determine the target of the terrorists’ nuclear missile. What results is a ton of close calls in this high-stakes global game of cat and mouse. Old bonds are revisited and new relationships form as a multinational force races to avoid Armageddon at the hands of Farhad and Taheri. Jacuzzi has successfully found a way to blend his multiple interests in travel, history, weapons systems, intelligence services, and aviation in this electrifying novel. He skillfully has set up a Dalton Drake series by creating a longtime spy and seducer who has reached a point when he’s considering settling down, if only his past will let him. By having Dalton be a private investigator in the author’s hometown of Winnipeg, Jacuzzi creates the flexibility to place him on an international stage or give him a complex local case to solve. And by leaving most of his characters alive, the author has positioned himself to pick and choose from his large cast for future volumes in the series. Based on this exhilarating series opener, he certainly knows how to pen a breakneck narrative. Here’s hoping Jacuzzi can continue to build on this promising beginning.
An intriguing, complex hero emerges in this riveting espionage tale.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781039160651
Page Count: 420
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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