Rousing gunfire and espionage elevated by an indelible protagonist.
Environmental graduate student Chesney Barrett infiltrates a group of eco-radicals intent on making an explosive statement with a nuclear bomb in Gallant’s (Satan’s Stronghold, 2006) thriller.
Travis Weld, head of a special government task force, kills an ex–KGB officer who has a couple of nuclear bombs for sale. Unfortunately, someone’s already bought one of them. Weld turns to Chesney, whom he’s worked with before. As a science-fair judge, Chesney befriends the Russian’s daughter, Maria Zarnov, and then manages to track a potential buyer through a quote, one he’d said on TV and later suggested for Maria’s presentation. This man, Stuart Kramer, is the executive director of the Global Alliance of Environmentalists. The alliance targets mostly oil companies, and Kramer seems especially to hate Titan Petroleum in Texas. Chesney gets in good with Kramer by documenting a few unreported spills around Titan’s pipeline. But she’s quickly wary of him after he hoodwinks her at a press conference, telling reporters that she found dead squirrels in the same areas. Chesney, believing Kramer may know about the bomb but is oblivious to the fact that “heavy hitter” Brian Forsyth’s planning on nuking a Titan refinery, looks for a stealthy way to warn Kramer. When it’s clear that Forsyth’s behind a bomb threat to Titan, Chesney plans to stop the eco-terrorists—she’ll just have to find the bomb first. As in other books in this series, Weld is merely the tough guy who thinks seduction is the only way to extract information from suspects. The story wisely centers on Chesney, an unquestionably intelligent woman who also makes an effective spy. She, for example, persuades people to trust her while remaining skeptical of everyone and manages, armed or not, to fight off both assassins and thugs attacking her. Gallant’s descriptions of Chesney’s Louisiana bayou life are vibrant: “Air hung heavy with the taste of weed-clogged water flavored by a hint of wild hibiscus and tangy cedar.” Action scenes, too, are exceptional, typically with Weld and partner Cassidy, who pride themselves on killing—in lieu of haggling with—terrorists. But it’s truly the resourceful and memorable Chesney’s story and, quite frankly, her series.
Rousing gunfire and espionage elevated by an indelible protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40880-1
Page Count: 200
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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