A fast-paced series entry with an exemplary protagonist.
In the third thriller featuring Winston Sage, the former physician/epidemiologist joins a task force looking at a probable agro-terrorist plot in the U.S.
FBI Agent Dan Tilikso interrupts Win’s retirement in Santa Fe with a call to ask for his assistance. Having previously worked with Tilikso on a bioterrorist attack, Win flies to Washington, D.C., to help deal with an apparent threat to American agribusiness. He and other members of the Agro-terrorism Task Force scrutinize four recent cases of an “extremely rare” variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Since the victims’ exposure likely occurred at least a decade earlier and no additional cases have surfaced, Win determines the variant CJD was someone’s trial run. Meanwhile, a terrorist group is planning an economic strike against U.S. agriculture. It’s propagating various infectious agents via livestock on a Yemen farm while American-born jihadi pilots will initiate the “spraying program” to infect U.S. wheat fields. Aiding the group is Abdullah, a Pakistani with ties to the variant CJD cases. He, however, has animosity for the Brits; as a British citizen, he’s reportedly faced discrimination against people of color. While Win tries to determine the terrorists’ point of attack, the task force learns about Abdullah and realizes the U.K. may be in danger of his lethal vengeance. As in preceding installments like The Bag Boys’ Jihad (2018), Grufferman favors short scenes and chapters that help to keep his story moving briskly. Entailing myriad debates on strategy from both the good guys and bad, the narrative favors dialogue over description. The story is nevertheless consistently enthralling, giving ample space to the villains’ unnerving perspective, including a growing distrust of Abdullah—not a true believer—that could lead to his murder. Though Win occasionally sits out the narrative for villaincentric and England-set sequences, he remains a worthy hero for his deductive reasoning. Even his argument against immediately suspecting terrorism is sound, though readers are already aware of terrorist involvement.
A fast-paced series entry with an exemplary protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Lots of violent action with little payoff.
Jack Ryan Jr. is back to risk life and limb in saving a teenage girl from international killers while his father, U.S. President Jack Ryan Sr., figures out what to do with Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment facility, hidden in a mine.
Junior, head of the secret intelligence outfit The Campus, which was functionally wiped out in Tom Clancy Flash Point (2023), is heading across Texas to a rendezvous with his fiancee, Lisanne Robertson, a one-armed former Marine and cop. He’s waylaid by the aftermath of a multi-vehicle accident that he discovers resulted from a gun attack that left a driver hanging on for life, and now puts Jack in the crosshairs of the gunmen. A tip leads him to a 4 a.m. meeting with Amanda, a single mom whose impetuous daughter, Bella, has run off with her highly undesirable boyfriend only to be abducted by the baddies. Meanwhile...in the nation’s capital, American surveillance has determined that Iran is on the cusp of nuclear armament. The only way to stop them is unleashing an unpiloted and untested super plane with massive destructive power. The book’s treatment of Iran’s “existential threat to the entire globe” as a subplot is rather curious, to say the least. You keep waiting for Bentley to connect the two stories, but that happens only superficially. Late in the book, we are told as an afterthought that Iran’s immediate threat had been “mitigated.” Unfortunately, there is no mitigation of the novel’s hackneyed prose—"The analytical portion of Jack’s brain couldn’t help but be impressed.”
Lots of violent action with little payoff.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422816
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
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