A violent page-turner with compelling imagery that will leave readers breathless.
In Icelandic author Simonar’s thriller, set largely in the Washington, D.C., area, a renowned doctor encounters international conspiracies, political intrigue, ruthless murders, and billion-dollar deals.
At 32 years of age, Dr. Caroline Glyn is already a world authority on malignant cells, and her research may be getting closer to identifying a cure for cancer. But her personal life is unraveling; she’s a widow and single mother after her doctor husband died of a brain tumor, and now she’s faced with mounting debt and the very real chance that her research funding will end soon. While dropping off her 5-year-old daughter, Mary, at a prestigious school in Georgetown, she meets the father of Mary’s friend: an elderly Russian man who goes by the name Rykov and says that he works for a multinational trading company. He and Glyn unexpectedly bond, due to their shared feelings of loss; his wife also died from cancer. When Glyn returns to pick up Mary later that afternoon, however, the mother and daughter witness the brutal killing of Rykov and his child in an apparent hit—but before the old man dies, he grabs Glyn’s hand and inexplicably transfers his essence into her consciousness. Soon, Glyn, through conversations with FBI Special Agent Carl Smith, discovers that Rykov was the head of the original Russian Mafia and was one of the most powerful, ruthless criminal masterminds in the world. Various groups maneuver to silence Glyn—she was the only one who saw Rykov’s killers, and, as a result, Mary is abducted. With her daughter missing—and her sanity seemingly fragmenting as an infamous criminal’s thoughts and memories blend with her own—Glyn sets out on a quest for vengeance.
Over the course of this novel, Simonar presents a thriller tale that’s absolutely relentless in its pacing. Indeed, he makes sure that the action is virtually nonstop from the first page to the last, while also establishing a dark crime fiction tone that can be decidedly brutal at times. However, it’s the clarity and purity of the writing, which is courageously uninhibited in style and complemented by forceful imagery, that makes this novel so compulsively readable throughout. For example, here’s a representative passage, after Rykov is killed in front of Glyn: “She drifted, eerily watching the blood seep out of the old man. It collected in a puddle that slowly circled the crushed cherry blossoms the girls had dropped on the asphalt. In curious detachment, Caroline marveled at how beautifully the two colors mingled, dark heavy red against the fleeting pink of a Washington spring.” Readers may have two minor criticisms with the work, however. First, there is the fact that the story never adequately explains how Rykov’s essence was transferred to Glyn, which some may find bothersome; and second, there are some occasional distracting errors in grammar over the course of the book. However, these elements are not likely to hinder readers’ overall enjoyment of this Beltway thriller.
A violent page-turner with compelling imagery that will leave readers breathless.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-9197966788
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Eventhor Media
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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