A definite improvement over the first book in the series.
In Breakfield and Burkey’s (The Enigma Factor, 2013) latest techno-thriller, a group combats evil in the digital world, with multiple assignments merging in Acapulco and the Cayman Islands.
When Thiago Bernardes’ daughter, Lara, goes missing after their argument, the businessman seeks help from Otto, head of the R-Group. JAC, aka Julie, finds a lead in Acapulco, where fellow group members (and lovers) Jacob and Petra are vacationing. The couple meets Simone and Carlos, the latter of whom hires Jacob to investigate a bank in the Cayman Islands and who, along with his brother Juan, may be responsible for the disappearance of Mexican drug lords and their money. In this, the second book in the Enigma series, the authors churn out a more streamlined narrative; while the first novel was essentially an origin story—dealing mostly with the recruitment of Jacob, who’s a minor player this time around—this volume dives right into the story with already established relationships such as Jacob and Petra’s. From there, the narrative efficiently sets up Carlos and Juan’s failed drug business and their decision to try their hand at laundering drug money. The story boasts strong characters: R-Group hacker Quip and JAC (both of whom are more pivotal to the narrative this time around) and Carlos, whose business ventures pit him in the role of villain but whose later choices—he considers giving up everything for Simone—make him much more commendable. Yet the shadier characters have more impact: Jesus, though Carlos and Juan’s uncle, is introduced holding a knife to Carlos’ throat, and sleazy porn filmmaker Spencer spends much of his time luring (or attempting to lure) women into his movies. Despite the porno subplot, the story is surprisingly tame: Simone’s friend Rita has to explain to Petra what a lap dance is. Strangely, R-Group’s missions are resolved well before the end, and the book’s final act focuses on the romantic connection between Carlos and Simone; Thiago’s attempt to placate board members demanding a successor (he’s waiting for Lara’s return); and an act of revenge that backfires against an R-Group member. Nevertheless, the story will hold readers’ attention until its unsettling conclusion, which once again leaves plenty of room for a sequel.
A definite improvement over the first book in the series.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493676897
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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