A tired spot-the-mole Washington story, laden with too much gunplay and unconvincing twists. The flyboy thrillmeister hits a...
Skirt-chasing burglar-turned-CIA black bagman Tommy Carmellini (a minor figure in Cuba, 1999) has his first solo adventure, with Coonts’s hero Rear Admiral Jake Grafton in a supporting role.
That this spin-off series debut involves the federal government, with most of its plot happening outside the Beltway, is the first of many small let-downs in an adequate but disappointing effort for fans of Coonts’s flyboy military escapades. After he effortlessly burgles a safe-deposit box to retrieve sex videos featuring his former lover, the wealthy Dorsey O’Shea, Carmellini, who normally hangs out in a lock-shop with his wise-cracking black sidekick Willie “the Wire,” is told to inspect security at a Virginia mountain CIA safehouse. He arrives in time to find the complex under assault and on fire, though he’s lucky enough to kill one assailant and rescue CIA translator Kelly Erlanger plus a suitcase full of old KGB files before the bad guys give chase. A feisty Erlanger tells him that the safehouse’s guest, former KGB archivist Mikhail Goncharov, had been spilling all kinds of insider info before the attack. Someone, obviously, wanted to shut him up. Coonts then begins one of several jarring shifts, changing from Carmellini’s flip first-person narrative to a more basic third person portraying Goncharov as he hides out in a nearby vacation home. Carmellini gets almost no sleep as bad guys try to kill everyone close to him, including his CIA boss, Willie, and O’Shea. Erlanger, Carmellini, and O’Shea now flee to the Rehoboth Beach vacation home of retired Rear Admiral Jake Grafton. It’s Grafton who’ll find out that highly placed government figures are blaming Carmellini for the attack on the safehouse—figures who fear that Goncharov’s old files might expose a long-simmering scheme to take over the country at a New York political convention.
A tired spot-the-mole Washington story, laden with too much gunplay and unconvincing twists. The flyboy thrillmeister hits a grounder.Pub Date: May 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-28362-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will...
A pathological liar, a woman in a coma, a childhood diary, an imaginary friend, an evil sister—this is an unreliable-narrator novel with all the options.
"A lot of people would think I have a dream job, but nightmares are dreams too." Was it only a week ago Amber Reynolds thought her job as an assistant radio presenter was a nightmare? Now it's Dec. 26 (or Boxing Day, because we're in England), and she's lying in a hospital bed seemingly in a coma, fully conscious but unable to speak or move. We won't learn what caused her condition until the end of the book, and the journey to that revelation will be complicated by many factors. One: She doesn't remember her accident. Two: As she confesses immediately, "Sometimes I lie." Three: It's a story so complicated that even after the truth is exposed, it will take a while to get it straight in your head. As Amber lies in bed recalling the events of the week that led to her accident, several other narrative threads kick up in parallel. In the present, she's visited in her hospital room by her husband, a novelist whose affections she has come to doubt. Also her sister, with whom she shares a dark secret, and a nasty ex-boyfriend whom she ran into in the street the week before. He works as a night porter at the hospital, giving him unfortunate access to her paralyzed but not insensate body. Interwoven with these sections are portions of a diary, recounting unhappy events that happened 25 years earlier from a 9-year-old child's point of view. Feeney has loaded her maiden effort with possibilities for twists and reveals—possibly more than strictly necessary—and they hit like a hailstorm in the last third of the book. Blackmail, forgery, secret video cameras, rape, poisoning, arson, and failing to put on a seat belt all play a role.
Though the novel eventually begins to sag under the weight of all its plot elements, fans of the psychological thriller will enjoy this ambitious debut.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14484-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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