A sophisticated spy story with serious historical chops that might serve as an interesting companion to Adam Tooze’s WWI...
The second entry in a spy trilogy set at the end of World War I.
Venerable thriller writer Goddard (The Ways of the World, 2015, etc.) reveals here that this isn’t so much a trilogy as one continuous narrative that’s humming along to an inevitable conclusion. That said, readers who were frustrated by the cliffhanger ending of the first entry have a “To Be Concluded” waiting for them here. The story picks up with James “Max” Maxted, a handsome young flying ace–turned–double agent. He’s working for German intelligence officer Fritz Lemmer but reporting back to his overlords in the British government. He’s also still seeking to avenge his murdered aristocrat father, an event cleverly documented in an intelligence memo to catch up new readers. Max has been sent by Lemmer to a remote part of Scotland to retrieve “the grey file,” a coded list that documents the agents Lemmer has placed in foreign governments. Meanwhile, Max’s best friend, Sam Twentyman, is trying to lay low as chief mechanic for the British diplomatic fleet but keeps getting tangled up with a pair of intelligence brokers, Travis Ireton and Schools Morahan. In a parallel plot, Max’s mother, Lady Maxted, engages her brother George Clissold to deal with a lawsuit against her late husband. At the center of all this subterfuge are the new players in this global game, the Japanese, as a gangster named Count Tomura Iwazu works to consolidate power and turn this newly divided world to Japan’s benefit. As with the previous book, Goddard is an excellent prose stylist, and his attention to historical detail is masterful. Its sedate storytelling won’t please readers looking for more bombastic thrills, but for those seeking a throwback to a gentler age, Goddard offers a solid follow-up.
A sophisticated spy story with serious historical chops that might serve as an interesting companion to Adam Tooze’s WWI history, The Deluge (2014).Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2522-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Twisty and propulsive.
A first date takes a sinister turn for a troubled young woman in Walker’s third psychological thriller.
It’s the day after Laura Lochner’s date with a man she met online, and she hasn’t returned to the Connecticut home of her sister, Rosie, her brother-in-law, Joe, and their little boy, Mason, where she’s been staying after a bad breakup. Rosie fears the worst, but Joe advises caution. After all, Laura is an adult and can have some fun, right? But Rosie has a bad feeling. Laura won’t answer her phone, and Rosie only has more questions after poking around online for info on Laura’s date, Jonathan Fields. Rosie eventually calls the police, and events begin to cascade like dominoes. Interspersed with Rosie’s attempt to trace Laura’s movements and get a handle on the guy she went out with is Laura’s first-person account of the actual date as well as enlightening snippets of sessions between Laura and her therapist. Laura’s is the most compelling part—a tormented, often prickly piece of storytelling by a woman carrying the pain of a horrible event that happened in high school and feelings of abandonment by a father who always seemed to love Rosie more. Laura’s desire to be loved is all-consuming, but her conviction that she is not worthy of love is heartbreaking. She sees subterfuge in nearly everything Jonathan says and does. Meanwhile, Rosie must come to terms with some ugly surprises of her own as she digs into their past. As the timelines inevitably converge, Walker’s clever misdirection paves the way to a truly chilling finale, and she has plenty of insightful things to say about the blame placed on women by society and themselves for the idiotic, careless, and sometimes downright evil things men do.
Twisty and propulsive.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19867-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Fans—and Grisham has endless numbers of them—will be pleased.
The prolific Grisham (The Reckoning, 2018, etc.) turns in another skillfully told procedural.
Pay attention to the clerical collar that Cullen Post occasionally dons in Grisham’s latest legal thriller. Post comes by the garb honestly, being both priest and investigative lawyer, his Guardian Ministries devoted to freeing inmates who have been wrongly imprisoned. Says an adversary at the start of the book, learning that his conviction is about to be overturned, “Is this a joke, Post?” Post replies: “Oh sure. Nothing but laughs over here on death row.” Aided by an Atlantan whom he sprang from the slam earlier, Post turns his energies to trying to do the same for Quincy Miller, a black man imprisoned for the murder of a white Florida lawyer who “had been shot twice in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun, and there wasn’t much left of his face.” It’s to such icky details that Post’s meticulous mind turns: Why a shotgun and not a pistol, as most break-ins involve? Who would have done such a thing—surely not the guy's wife, and surely not for a measly $2 million in life insurance? As Grisham strews the path with red herrings, Post, though warned off by a smart forensic scientist, begins to sniff out clues that point to a culprit closer to the courtroom bench than the sandy back roads of rural Florida. Grisham populates his yarn with occasionally goofy details—a prosecuting attorney wants Post disbarred “for borrowing a pubic hair” from the evidence in a case—but his message is constant throughout: The “innocent people rotting away in prison” whom Post champions are there because they are black and brown, put there by mostly white jurors, and the real perp “knew that a black guy in a white town would be much easier to convict.” The tale is long and sometimes plods, especially in its courtroom scenes, but it has a satisfying payoff—and look out for that collar at the end.
Fans—and Grisham has endless numbers of them—will be pleased.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54418-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
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