A sexy start to unraveling a damaged heroine and killer.
A repressed Black Ops seductress and assassin falls for her latest target in this first installment of a planned romantic suspense trilogy.
The debut book begins with an unnamed bleeding woman, left for dead in a frozen field and mourning her life. “Too much violence and lies and betrayal, and so much of it her own design,” she muses. The narrative then shifts to nine days earlier, with Evera Grant on a plane returning from her latest mission. The beautiful 27-year-old has been with the Section, a rogue CIA offshoot, for the last decade, working within its “Judith Program” for the last three years. As operative “Jezebel,” Evera cozies up to male targets to get critical intelligence, sleeping with and/or killing them as necessary. While she deploys her sexuality for the job, Evera, who came to the Section after some repressed trauma, recoils from real-life intimacy, including not wanting Adam, the Section colleague whom she loves, to even kiss her. After Evera and Adam have a tense reunion at the Section’s West Virginia compound, she is sent to Hawaii to attract “Cort,” a criminal who may also be “White,” the Section’s most elusive and prized target. To her shock, Cort turns out to be a very considerate—and appealing—man. As their relationship heats up, the order comes down to kill Cort immediately, leaving Evera with some heartbreaking choices. Reid has written a nifty, edgy romantic thriller. The troubled Evera is given two equally alluring love interests, and her split personality is skillfully reflected via her alternatively fingering a childhood locket and the titanium wire bracelet that is her weapon of choice. While Evera’s capitulation to Cort is initially surprising, it sets off an entertaining action- and sex-packed sequence of events. The author also plants enough intriguing hints about Evera’s past (Section personnel immediately recognized her as “Les Grant’s daughter”) and the significance of the novel’s ending to whet reader interest in her continuing journey.
A sexy start to unraveling a damaged heroine and killer.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77302-209-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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