An adrenaline-fueled spy romp that almost makes its familiar tropes seem new.
A former contract assassin finds the spy game a lot harder than it looks.
Ambassador Claus Eichberg rots in a Tunisian prison, blaming “Caspian Anderson and his cockroach of a girlfriend” and praying for death, which is finally, brutally delivered by villainous Hwang Sung-jin. For his part, Caspian, formerly an assassin under the code name Elias, currently works for the Defense Clandestine Service and is in Kenya tailing Brazilian politician Dolores Araujo, who’s secretly a paid Chinese asset. Following Araujo through the slums of Nairobi, he’s gobsmacked to spot the aforementioned girlfriend, Liesel Bergmann, apparently similarly engaged. Like him, she’s an experienced operative with an impressive resume. Simmering under the turbulent action of Elias’ second adventure is the same question that propelled the first (The Elias Network, 2024): Can Caspian trust Liesel? His latest mission takes him to France and ultimately Tanzania, but not before he ricochets around Washington and environs and commiserates with his family in Portland, Maine. The droll joke is that his parents and his brother, Nelson, a physician for Doctors Without Borders, expect mild-mannered Caspian to settle down in Portland and take over his dad’s modest trucking business. The mission he’s pursuing instead involves Frank LaBelle, a rather naïve tech chief executive. Caspian finds himself periodically facing perilous predicaments and twists of allegiance. Cryptocurrency of course figures prominently, and Sung-jin reappears for an evil encore. Gervais deftly shuffles his large cast of characters like pieces on a chessboard, with well-timed “surprises” and many chapters ending in cliffhangers.
An adrenaline-fueled spy romp that almost makes its familiar tropes seem new.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781662518553
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Fast-moving fun from start to finish.
A hijacked laser weapon threatens to ignite World War III.
The U.S. is testing the EAGL, or Enhanced Aerial Gunnery Laser, an airborne defense system that annihilates anything it hits. It’s so fast it “can shoot down a hundred ballistic missiles before they leave enemy territory,” it never runs out of ammunition, and it will “make ballistic missiles obsolete.” But a traitor named Ridley Wiles hijacks the plane that carries it, and he kills the crew. Radar contact is lost, and National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA) salvage experts Kurt Austin and Joe Zavala undertake an urgent mission to find or destroy the EAGL before Russia or China lay their hands on it. Meanwhile, a smuggler named Ahab who specializes in dumping toxic waste is dying. He blames Kurt and Gushan, an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and would like nothing better than to cause World War III before he dies. The action and excitement are damn near constant. The U.S. and China have begun joint operations on certain projects, and Kurt and Joe save Gushan’s life—barely—in the prologue. But Gushan’s superiors may later order him to hunt Americans down and kill them. He knows he owes his saviors a debt, but he is also loyal to his country and to the PLA, so he has a dilemma. The heroes are all that NUMA series readers have come to expect—smart, honorable, and resourceful under life-and-death pressure. They face attacks on the NUMA vessel Lyra, try to save a sinking ship, commandeer a cargo plane—Joe can fly it, but isn’t so sure about landing it—and hope Ahab doesn’t blow it out of the sky. As always in this series, the story is a high-stakes, brace-yourself adventure with admirable heroes who don’t shy away from the next challenge.
Fast-moving fun from start to finish.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9798217184972
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
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