by Sadia Barrameda ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2015
Action junkies will be more than satisfied by this thriller.
A Kurdish warrior and an American soldier take on Islamic terrorists threatening massive Ebola attacks in Barrameda’s debut adventure novella.
When members of the terrorist group Al-Dawla Al-Islamiya fi al-Iraq wa al-Sham (aka the Islamic State group, ISIL, or ISIS) massacre a village, it turns out that they have a hidden agenda: retrieval of some Ebola samples and their corresponding research. Soon they create weapons armed with the virus—a new strain that rapidly infects and kills its victims. U.S. Air Force Col. Mark Thomas initiates a personal mission of vengeance after the terrorist group bombs his base, and he commandeers a helicopter to rescue several captured women from the radicals. One of those women is Ren, a trained warrior who already has her own vendetta against the terrorists, who are responsible for the deaths of her father and brother. Mark and Ren form a two-person army and set their sights on the terrorist leader, Askari. This novella is a quick read that gets the action started almost immediately. The story speeds through much of its plot; a helicopter in flight, for example, is sure to be on the ground by the very next page. Barrameda’s prose is compact and precise, and she packs her novella with continuous gunfire and endless explosions. She also allows Ren to stand out, as her weapon of choice is a knife—an abundance of knives, actually, which she deftly throws at her enemies. Amazingly, the author still leaves room to develop her two main characters, and they convincingly build mutual trust by repeatedly saving each other from certain death. Their inevitable romantic relationship, on the other hand, is a little harder to believe; they fall in love too quickly and easily, and the scenes of the two in each other’s arms are considerably less engaging than the ones in which they battle extremists. The story manages a surprisingly understated ending that offers both resolution and the possibility of a sequel.
Action junkies will be more than satisfied by this thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507568279
Page Count: 98
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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