An assassin story that delivers action while shrewdly examining the consequences.
In Elder’s (Daughters of the World, 2014, etc.) thriller, sex-trafficking mobsters and U.S. authorities threaten a secret group that specializes in administering justice for violated women.
Sandra Neuermann is raped and narrowly escapes her assailants, who likely would have killed her. Cops apprehend the two men, but the arrest is thrown out on a technicality. This makes Neuermann a perfect recruit for Nemesis, a covert organization (of mostly women) that helps rape victims and targets those attackers who’ve escaped punishment. Neuermann trains as a Fury, a field operative, going after and sometimes killing rapists as well as sex traffickers, like an Albanian Mafia family in New York. However, Nemesis’ full-on assault against said family may be drawing too much attention from both gangsters and the alphabet soup of U.S. agencies, who’ve noticed that a lot of baddies have been disappearing. Elder’s thriller highlights a group of female agents without turning the idea into a gimmick. The women are undeniably formidable with guns, fisticuffs, or at a computer: Bridget O’Rourke “tapped her keyboard and the engines in the Mercedes and the Range Rover died. The doors locked, and the occupants heard a loud pop. It was the last thing they heard as the canisters released a knockout gas.” The villains are a largely rotten bunch, seemingly deserving of their fate at the business end of a Sig or sniper rifle. Yet Elder deepens his story by addressing the inevitable fallout: one Fury in particular is devastated when she has to kill an innocent bystander simply because he could have identified her later. Nemesis Director Jeanne Mooth, too, prides herself on the organization’s hovering under the radar—something that’s increasingly difficult to accomplish when it’s abundantly clear to all interested parties that someone is specifically targeting the Albanian mob’s brothels. Neuermann is a well-established protagonist who starts a relationship with handsome, kindhearted teacher Daniel, which may explain her gradual aversion to killing and preference for less-personal strikes against sex-trafficking groups. Unfortunately, other Furies don’t receive as much characterization. Many are relegated to Nemesis reports; Jane and Arlene, for example, first appear as names in their filed paperwork, merely to introduce (and close) the latest rapist’s case. The ending may shock more than a few readers, but it definitely packs a dramatic punch.
An assassin story that delivers action while shrewdly examining the consequences.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
