Although this thriller has many subplots and supporting characters, they never overwhelm its engaging storyline and alluring...
A CIA officer and a scientist race to recover incriminating evidence before government agents or a sadistic killer can stop them in Baker’s debut thriller.
Environmental crusader and ethnobotanist Dr. April Gentry has samples of Rapatea Z, a plant that could lead to a billion-dollar drug. Companies are understandably interested in acquiring it, and one of them, Sandoval Genetics, has sent a dangerous man, Anakim Sebastian, after April. Meanwhile, her computer-genius colleague Claude De Finod recently used an Oval Office code key to download a hefty batch of government data. Now he’s missing in action, but authorities believe that April knows the location of the stolen information. CIA agent Ian Wolfe opts to help April find De Finod’s hidden files, and they go on the lam together with the murderous Sebastian at their heels. The author dives right into the story, opening with April already in Brazil with her friend and partner Emilio Cortez gathering Rapatea Z samples. It establishes the book’s rapid pace, which rarely lets up. Back stories, particularly April’s and Wolfe’s, definitely augment the characters; April’s father, Michael, for example, simply disappeared when she was 11, and Wolfe, during his time as a Olympian decathlete, was publicly shamed by a scandal. The plot is so dense and features so many players that some of the finer details wind up buried. In most instances, however, specifics aren’t necessary: readers do eventually learn what De Finod downloaded, for example, but Baker wisely treats the files as a MacGuffin. Baker also creates an indelible villain to pit against the scientist: Sebastian, who hopes the world will fall into chaos even as April fights to save it. Action fans will be sated, particularly near the end, when Wolfe showcases his martial arts, hangs from a helicopter, and—suitably for a former Olympian—hurls a pole “javelin style.”
Although this thriller has many subplots and supporting characters, they never overwhelm its engaging storyline and alluring protagonists.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 334
Publisher: eBookIt.com
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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