A slow spy novel with a capable lead.
In Goldsmith’s suspense novel, a young woman is recruited to be a spy.
The day after 20-year-old Nicollette Beverley’s field hockey team wins the championship in Worcestershire, England, in 1975, she gets a letter from the Ministry of Defense inviting her to a job interview, although she doesn’t remember applying for a job. When she arrives, she learns the interviewer is the husband of her field hockey coach, who thinks she would be a great candidate for a new program recruiting young women to the Ministry of Defense. Everything is shrouded in secrecy, but Nicollette accepts the position. She weathers an extensive orientation process, training to join an all-female group of spies. Thus she begins a James Bond–esque adventure traveling Europe and learning the job as she goes. She is ultimately pulled into a Cold War plot involving a plan to overthrow the Communist government in Bulgaria. She later works on an assignment in the Middle East in which a few of her friends end up in danger. While the setup is intriguing, the author’s wordy style saps momentum (“The letter concluded with a statement about the need for an expedient response and the need for confidentiality, as this opportunity was not available to the general public. Nicollette’s first reaction was that this sounded like an application for the military, and she wasn’t interested in joining the military, but there was no military reference”). Still, Nicollette is an intriguing protagonist. The action doesn’t really get rolling, however, until the last third of the novel. And once the action finally begins, the spycraft, while most likely realistic if not always exciting, seems to involve a lot of meetings and paperwork.
A slow spy novel with a capable lead.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985526509
Page Count: 542
Publisher: Banatzoe Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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