Unpolished and loosely organized, but more thoughtful and sensitive than other thrillers that vilify the Islamic world.
A thoughtful but unwieldy and polarizing thriller that sets clever American officers against devious Iranian machinations.
Reardon begins his first novel with kinetic, slice-of-life portraits of American hero Jordan Wright and chief villain Mustafa Amadi. Jordan is in Umbria, Italy, recuperating from a mission, having successfully—and coincidentally—terminated Mustafa’s mentor and five other men, a sin that he coolly, iconoclastically confesses to a priest after wandering into the confessional of a small parish church. The priest absolves Jordan with overly agreeable (and hardly credible) aplomb, and Jordan makes his way south to Assisi to visit the former CIA agent turned Catholic priest who initially recruited him into the world of international espionage. Eventually, his boss briefs him and sends him back stateside to work. From the book’s opening chapters, the structure alternates from these good-guy intelligence ops to the bad guys’ scheming and maneuvering. Already situated in the United States with economic and personnel resources, Mustafa, whose superior in the Iranian covert forces and fellow “warrior for the jihad” is now removed from the picture, allies with the mysterious Jerome Fernandez-Medina, deciding to fight the capitalist enemy while making some capital for himself. Mustafa, based in Philadelphia, has insinuated himself into the lives of several Iranian families as an “uncle,” and he’s using adolescent and teenage boys to carry out a mission, kept secret even from the boys, that will eventually take place at the Independence Mall. Mustafa is murderous and intimidating, even a bit over the top, and his consorts are fearful, dutiful and simpering, while the crackerjack squad of law enforcement officers Jordan works with in Philly, including romantic interest Kate, is painted in uniform, straightforward shades of red, white and blue. Sometimes the narrative unfolds too slowly, with an abundance of picking up and dialing cell phones, walking in and out of rooms, and indistinguishable characters hearing and/or participating in predictable, nearly automated conversations. Frequent grammatical and spelling errors provide additional hiccups, even as the climax delivers on its much-anticipated suspense.
Unpolished and loosely organized, but more thoughtful and sensitive than other thrillers that vilify the Islamic world.Pub Date: July 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456508289
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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