If you believe a criminal lost the White House in 2016, give Coonts’ (Liberty’s Last Stand, 2016, etc.) latest a try. But be...
Tommy Carmellini returns in this thriller based on the 2016 presidential election.
CIA Director Jake Grafton ponders the shocking defeat of Cynthia Hinton by Vaughn Conyer, a New York billionaire with no political experience. Gasp! Ripped from the headlines! And Hinton must be Clinton! And Conyer must be—but alas, he's no Drump. Hoping to cut a deal for himself, jailed pedophile Junior Sikes asks for a visit from the FBI. He plans to snitch on his employer, voting machine maker American ElectTech, for having rigged the election results. But the "agent" who shows up puts a bullet in his brain before the real FBI can arrive. Although this doesn't look like the CIA's business, Grafton wants narrator Carmellini to look for a foreign connection, a task that receives only token attention. Carmellini’s real CIA job is “technician,” meaning he does dirty work wherever necessary. He "burgle[s] places" and delivers a fake subpoena, and when he impersonates a Federal Election Commissioner to get into the home of a political scientist who committed suicide, he finds a stack of printed spreadsheets labeled “Armageddon.” Perhaps, he muses, it refers to the election as the “final battle between good and evil.” He sounds like a wiseass PI straight out of pulp fiction. In one scene he slaps a guy, then says “Don’t get all constipated on me, Kurt. We got a relationship going here.” Then Kurt whispers, “The wrong person won the election.” Later, Carmellini blows a bad guy’s brains out with his .45 after he decides “Screw that first-shot crap.” As subtly as a train wreck, the author, through Carmellini, compares today’s progressive left with World War II fascists: “Both hated free speech,” blah, blah. And there’s the evil, near-nonagenarian billionaire and one-time SS Hitlerite Anton Hunt, who now supports left-wing causes and may have tried to fix the election for Clin—er, Hinton.
If you believe a criminal lost the White House in 2016, give Coonts’ (Liberty’s Last Stand, 2016, etc.) latest a try. But be warned: it won’t make American literature great again.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62157-659-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Regnery
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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