An often engaging romantic thriller.
Huntington (Jade, 2013, etc.) pits two CIA agents against an international smuggling cartel in this romantic thriller.
Charlotte, N.C.–based realtor Darcy Devereaux interrupts a date with her fiance, Pete, to show a frustrating (but handsome) customer, Matt McCord, the Warren Estate for the fourth time. To Darcy’s surprise, Matt agrees to buy the property and personally hires her to oversee its renovation. She has four months to finish while he’s in Europe. Unbeknownst to her, Matt is a CIA agent, and he heads for Athens, Greece, where he and his partner, Leeza, take on a mission to help Greek authorities search for stolen artifacts. Professor Stephanos Papandrou, the director of antiquities at the Athens National Museum, has been murdered, and several porcelain miniatures were taken from his home, including a statuette called the Morning Glory Woman. Matt and Leeza, posing as archaeologists, investigate and soon learn of an international crime organization named ARES. Back in Charlotte, Darcy finds Pete growing cold, distant and downright nasty, particularly when she questions him about his friendship with the voluptuous Marilee. However, she’s soon preoccupied with a springhouse she finds on the Warren Estate, in which she finds a hidden cache of sculptures—never guessing that they relate both to Matt’s case and Pete’s altered demeanor. Later, Matt and Leeza encounter Gustav Longhren, an eccentric smuggler who owns the island of Scaurikk, which nobody leaves alive. Huntington exuberantly fuses these elements into a subtle, shimmering mystery, often offering readers dazzling opulence: “There were flowering vines and bushes in a profusion of colors...the entire effect was welcoming, a soothing elegance.” The characters, meanwhile, are mostly well-drawn, red-blooded men and women who hold their torrid longings in check; for example, Darcy, despite her engagement, frequently fantasizes about Matt, with his “eyes the color of the sky” and “perfectly sculpted” chin. (However, one minor character refers to homosexuality as “deviant,” which may offend some readers.) The villains are entertainingly bombastic, as well; in a flashback, Longhren says, “No jail will hold me, and no matter how long it takes, I’ll make you sorry you ever met me!”
An often engaging romantic thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492254553
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2013
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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