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THE CAUSE

An original voice launches this brooding, high-stakes series.

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A new CIA field operative joins a Black Ops training program whose leaders have targeted the government of a near-future America in Vincent’s debut dystopian thriller.

Isse Corvus, like any agent fresh off The Farm in 2022, has the option of training at The Abattoir. It’s a hard-core camp strictly off the grid, but grads reputedly earn the agency’s most dangerous and “frontline” jobs. Corvus opts in; he and the other newbs find themselves in an unknown jungle and quickly realize that it’s a fight for survival. Corvus has his own mission; CIA Station Chief Pelletier has sent him there to assassinate someone. But The Abattoir is more than a mere training camp. The program’s been secretly monitoring government officials like the National Security Agency director, Titus Montgomery, with a plan to take back the country from its tyrannical leaders. The novel opens in a haunting dystopia, in which the U.S. government tries to control its people, resulting in an America besieged by rioting citizens. It’s a perfect place to begin with Corvus, whose predicament becomes increasingly dire: he’s imprisoned and isolated in The Hole, a terrifying ordeal that pales in comparison to later events. Corvus is a protagonist with an ample back story; he was a hacktivist and also created a powerful artificial intelligence named Rose. There’s beaucoup action throughout, especially in the novel’s latter half, when The Minutemen, a liberation group, makes an aggressive move to stop quantum computers from obliterating the last of individuals’ privacy. But even the time in the jungle is crammed with intense, sometimes-brutal sequences. One of Corvus’ extended brawls has its own chapter. There’s also near starvation among the trainees; strange, armed men attacking the camp; and a head or two “kebabed on a skewer.” The book was clearly designed to kick off a series: it opens in 2026 before flashing back four years and gets nowhere close to catching up to its beginning.

An original voice launches this brooding, high-stakes series.

Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2014

ISBN: 978-1782797630

Page Count: 330

Publisher: Roundfire Books

Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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