A wry and fast-paced spy thriller unfolding in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia.
In Keech’s spy novel, an unlikely Russian emissary gets caught up in espionage.
Thirty-year-old Alexey Mikhailov travels from Nidgye, a small village near the Georgian border, at the behest of his mother, who wants him to visit the reliquary of Russia’s revered Saint Sergey at a monastery a few dozen miles outside of Moscow and plead for the saint’s intercession in Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine (Alexey’s father is indifferent, being an “old Soviet atheist holdover”). Specifically, the reliquary is for the 14th-century saint’s head; the priests serving there have recently been disturbed by online claims stating that their relic is fake and that the actual head of Saint Sergey currently resides in the Orthodox church of Ioann Russkiy, Saint John the Russian, in Istanbul. The clerics ask Alexey to disguise himself as a priest and go to Istanbul to investigate—as he’s eager to avoid the draft, Alexey quickly agrees. He travels to Istanbul, meeting a wealthy young man named Ivan (who will come back into his life in an unexpected way later in the story) as well as Angela Walker, a CIA operative under a cloud from a previous screw-up who’s been sent to Istanbul with U.S. Defense Clandestine Services Col. Michael Flint in order to intercept a mysterious Russian asset bearing an even more mysterious device. Angela and Alexey take a strong liking to each other, but everything is complicated by the pompous colonel. Keech stirs all of these elements into an utterly delightful mixture of high-stakes spy-drama and droll satire of high-stakes spy-drama. Alexey is a perfect hapless everyman whom readers will instinctively root for, delighting in the hijinks and scrapes he gets into in his quest to bring the saint’s head back to Russia. The double ending the author arranges is both heartwarming and appropriately cynical. Espionage fans will find much here to love.
A wry and fast-paced spy thriller unfolding in the shadow of the Hagia Sophia.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798988503460
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Real Nice Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
