The desperate and complicated political undercurrents of the late Cold War generate plenty of action; Faith is likely to be...
A steadily suspenseful, if sometimes sappy, Cold War thriller.
First-timer Hillhouse sets up an intriguing scenario—East Germany’s leader Erich Honecker and his Stasi allies want to assassinate Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev before his reforms unite the two Germanys and the Berlin wall comes down—and plays it out admirably. Faith Whitney, whose mother smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union, is a freelance smuggler herself, picking up tchotchkes like china teacups with hammer-and-sickled–shaped handles in East Berlin to sell in the West. In April 1989, she’s blackmailed by the Stasi into helping them with a plot to assassinate Gorbachev. (Honecker speculates that he would not survive the 40 years of “repressed wrath” of the East German citizens, nor the revenge of the former Nazis still in the West German judicial system.) Zara Bogdanov, a lesbian KGB agent, kidnaps Faith and tries to turn her into a double agent, using the extra bait that she can find out about Faith’s father, who her mother has kept a mystery. Suddenly Faith is caught in the “rift zone” between two factions of communists. She’s tortured by both the Stasi and the KGB, and limps through much of the book with broken ribs. Unknown to her, she’s being set up to look like a CIA agent who assassinates Gorbachev, letting the Stasi and KGB hardliners off the hook. Faith squeezes out of various tight spots with lots of help, thanks to Hakan, a Turkish operative who’s a master at forgery; Max Summers, an Ozarks ex-boyfriend who is an explosive disposal expert, even her estranged mother, who is operating an orphanage in Moscow and is smuggling explosives to the besieged Armenian Christians in Azerbaijan. The dialogue is lousy, and Faith, who tends to tremble, seems at times as if she belongs in a romance novel (the ending is shamelessly rosy). At her best, Faith is ingenious and plucky; she knows her Semtex from her C-4, her East/West Berlin and Moscow locations, and how to maneuver without a passport. Ultimately, she outsmarts the intelligence hierarchy of three regimes.
The desperate and complicated political undercurrents of the late Cold War generate plenty of action; Faith is likely to be back.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31013-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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