The balance of power in hapless Azerbaijan hinges on the fate of a kidnapped young woman—one Kelly Trost, snatched from her humanitarian wanderings by someone who killed her interpreter and all nearby witnesses. Despite this brutality, nobody would care about Kelly if she weren't the daughter of Senator Mitchell Trost, who has the power to block an oil pipeline scheduled to snake through Azerbaijan—and whom the Sons of Salvation, who claim responsibility for the kidnapping, consider the spawn of Satan. In truth, Mitch Trost doesn't wield nearly the power to appease the Sons by making the US sever diplomatic ties with Israel and fire all Jewish Americans in government posts. But his shadow is long enough to get action from the deceptively colorless US ambassador; from the Deputy Chief of Mission, Arthur Vandergraaf; from well-connected Oak Leaf Oil executive Dick Fleming; and from Lt. Col. Evan Burton, the temporary military representative in Baku. The trouble is that except Burton, a vintage steely-eyed Peters hero, the rest of the double-talking cast have agendas of their own—agendas that don't necessarily involve the freeing of Kelly Trost. The Azeris want the local Russian strongman blamed for her kidnapping; the silver-tongued diplomats and oilmen are wangling over which countries that pipeline should traverse; and even Burton's lover, Hedwig Seghers, is ready to betray her second-most-important allegiance, to her fiancÇe the German ambassador, to her first, which isn't Burton. When Burton goes hunting for Kelly, he finds that her abductors, whoever they are, can't hold on to her, or even save their own skins; and with every new twist on the original snatch, Peters (A Perfect Soldier, 1995, etc.) raises the stakes further. Long before the furious climax, a lot more than an oil pipeline has come to depend on the fate of Kelly Trost. Peters manages to be both rousing (definite summer movie possibilities here) and deeply disturbing. His portrait of the snakes mapping out current East-West diplomacy may make you long for the verities of the Cold War.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97362-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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