Highly recommended for fans of thrillers in the vein of Dan Brown’s and Robert Harris’ works.
In Heary’s debut thriller, the Catholic Church goes to great lengths to protect its reputation while the Kremlin is determined to destroy it.
When history teacher Maximilian Wolf in Bonn, Germany, discovers a written agreement, or concordat, between the Vatican and Adolf Hitler among his late father’s possessions, the Vatican’s senior clerics quickly dismiss it as a forgery. Dated June 1, 1939, it almost exactly follows the style and format of another, genuine document, the Reichskonkordat of 1933, which is enough to raise suspicions of foul play. Crucially, the new concordat, which purports to have been signed only three months prior to Germany’s invasion of Poland, hints at an anti-Russian pact between the Nazis and the Holy See, which would have shocking political ramifications. Its inauthenticity is likely, but the potential for it to be used as a propaganda tool worries the Vatican enough that they’re willing to pay Wolf for it. The head of the Vatican’s police force, Inspector Gen. Enzo Rossi, is assigned the task of recovering the document; when he arrives for a meeting with Wolf, he instead finds two dead bodies—and no concordat. Assuming, rightly, that the document has fallen into Russian hands, and that the Russians intend to use it as political leverage against the church, Rossi sets off, with the aid of CIA agent Cathy Doherty, on a time-sensitive mission to track down the thief. Overall, this novel is an impressive addition to a well-stocked thriller market. Fast-paced, intelligent conspiracy tales are hardly thin on the ground, nor are novels about Vatican-related scandal, so it takes something special to stand out from the crowd, which Heary provides here. His strengths lie in his ability to fuse dramatic tension, political intrigue, and even wry humor into a narrative that manages to be simultaneously informative and escapist. His attention to detail is particularly noteworthy; the years that he spent living in Moscow enable him to write with an authority that eludes many other thriller authors mining similar material.
Highly recommended for fans of thrillers in the vein of Dan Brown’s and Robert Harris’ works.Pub Date: June 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78901-344-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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