A vivid but uneven political tale with a strong protagonist.
A congresswoman attempts to get her married boyfriend—a veteran senator—elected to the presidency in this thriller.
Kati Case is a Democratic congresswoman representing Philadelphia, only 37 years old and already in her third term. She unabashedly considers herself a “power-crazy witch,” and after failing to elevate her father, Paul, to the Oval Office, she settles for making him chief justice of the Supreme Court. Now, she’s moving on to yet another kingmaking project. She wants Wilson Burnett, a Democratic senator, to be the next president even though the “beleaguered incumbent,” Daniel Bromwell, is also a Democrat, albeit a despairingly unpopular one. Meanwhile, Kati struggles to make sense of a shiftless personal life—she’s separated from her husband, Sam, a former governor who confesses he’s bisexual, and her current beau, Wilson, remains married to his wife, Amber, who forgives his dalliances. Kati is also carrying on a desultory relationship—really a series of assignations—with Brandon Jarrett, a Republican congressman eager to step out on his own wife. Greenberg assembles a memorable cast of characters, some of them satirically overblown, though delightfully so. For example, Randy Carraway, the mayor of a small town in North Dakota, fisherman, and hockey player, sets his sights on the presidency, too; he’s a marvelously inarticulate man only looking to become a media star. But the plot never quite achieves either the heights of drama or farce—in a political age that produces its own surreal theater, the author’s flights of fancy seem anodyne. Even a dark plot twist involving the possibility of presidential treason doesn’t depart from well-worn pulp fiction grooves. The highlight of the novel is the protagonist, a remarkably capable woman who consistently underplays her potential—she brags to an illicit paramour while hooking up in his home during a party that she’s a “soundless fuck”—but also pines for something more meaningful, a tension delicately portrayed by Greenberg.
A vivid but uneven political tale with a strong protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73546-800-6
Page Count: 257
Publisher: Greenville Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.
Evildoers plan attacks from America to India, and Jack Ryan Jr. is a prime target.
In Washington state, a man and his family are murdered, and President Jack Ryan learns it is another Poseidon Spear incident. Three retired members of that counterterrorism group have been killed now, and the U.S. government suspects a mole in its midst. Meanwhile, the Umayyad Revolutionary Council believes it has a holy and wholly anti-American mission. Against this backdrop, Jack Ryan Jr., and his fiancée, Lisanne Robertson, visit Delhi, India, to attend the wedding of Srini Rai, the brilliant surgeon who attached Lisanne’s prosthetic left arm. Lisanne had lost her arm in Tom Clancy Shadow of the Dragon (2020). Jack and Lisanne are both operators working for the Campus, a covert group that executes secret presidential directives. A wedding is a happy occasion, and the engaged American couple intend the trip as a vacation. Jack and Lisanne will attend a sangeet, an elaborate pre-wedding party. But it isn’t long before they survive a suicide bomb attack. As with all Clancy novels, there’s plenty of action on a global scale. In simultaneous strikes, terrorists plan to contaminate America’s Western water supply with radioactive waste from Washington’s Hanford nuclear power plant, blow up a spectacular new bridge in Kashmir, and kill the evil Ryan—or Junior, at least. It will be At-Takwir, the end of days. There is an appealing mix of Indian culture, high-speed action, and the rich lode of details that characterizes the whole series. And in the background lingers the question on several characters’ minds: Have Jack and Lisanne set their own wedding date?
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718032
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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