Dramatic history presented in vivid detail.
A World War II Navy captain looks for signs of a Japanese atomic bomb program.
In March 1945, Germany has given up, but the war in the Pacific is far from over. Captain Wolfe Bowen is ordered to check out a surrendered German U-boat that had two Japanese passengers aboard and find out what they’d been doing in the North Atlantic. The sub is a strange one, having a second deck but no torpedo tubes. In that extra deck is uranium that the German captain will not show Bowen even at gunpoint. Strahlung, the German explains. Radiation. Bowen reports this to his superiors, who clue him in about our Manhattan Project, which is so secret that FDR (who dies within weeks) even keeps it from Vice President Truman. Bowen also learns that the Nazis had been trying to develop an atomic bomb, so is Germany sharing its technology with Japan? That is for Bowen to find out as he travels by submarine through dangerous Japanese waters. Indeed, as U.S. brass had never expected, he witnesses spectacular evidence of the enemy’s nuclear efforts. This news must immediately get to the suddenly President Truman. What if an atomic bomb explodes on our invading troops? In this fictional telling, such a prospect drives Truman to drop U.S. bombs first. Bowen works closely with Lieutenant Commander Janet Waring, who knows Japanese culture and language. They get along quite well—he’s a big fellow who pumps iron to relieve his stress, then learns that she is happy to relieve his stress in bed. After the bombs, President Truman directs the duo to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and report back to him how bad it really was. And how did ordinary people feel about the American victors—was it rage or resignation? What “the Japanese were calling the second sun had bloomed in the early morning sky over Hiroshima” and left human shadows burned into sidewalks. Survivors looked like the living dead. All colors disappeared, leaving only black and white. Bowen and Waring are exceptionally good at finding out what the big shots need to know, and readers will like them both. Whether Japan ever had its own atomic bomb program is unknown, though the author thinks they probably did.
Dramatic history presented in vivid detail.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781250360977
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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