An exuberantly plotted, if uneven, entry in a promising thriller series.
Action hero Daniel Petrovich tackles a worldwide biological-weapons threat in the second installment of Konkoly’s (Black Flagged, 2011, etc.) thriller series.
In a rural compound in Argentina, retired U.S. general Terrence Sanderson plans to reactivate his rogue Black Flag training program. He believes that the only effective way to tackle the world’s problems is by sending operatives on under-the-radar black-ops missions. However, Sanderson is wanted by the FBI for past misdeeds, and his best operatives, married couple Daniel and Jessica Petrovich, are having issues of their own. Jessica, who’s haunted by her previous undercover work, even tries to talk her husband into leaving the program. Amid this tension, a new assignment bubbles up: CIA agent Karl Berg, who has gone “off the books” before, has gotten wind that a disgruntled Russian scientist has unleashed a virulent virus into the water of a remote Russian town to demonstrate the weapon’s worth to Muslim extremists. With Daniel on the ground in Russia and illegally deployed CIA drones in the air, Sanderson and Berg join forces to observe the contagion and track down the scientist before the Russian government covers up the danger. Meanwhile, Jessica, taking a break in Buenos Aires, gets a visit from Serbians seeking revenge. The pace certainly doesn’t flag in this second entry in U.S. Naval Academy graduate Konkoly’s series. The book has an often confusing array of government-agency players, which makes Konkoly’s front-of-book character list a particularly welcome and necessary reference. The author’s description of the rabies-like Russian contagion is particularly intriguing and will no doubt please fans of The Walking Dead graphic-novel and TV series. The series continues to struggle with character development, however, within its imaginative plots; for example, Daniel, who rose up as a potential hero of the series in the first book, retreats somewhat into the background here, serving as merely another tool in the author’s entertaining tale of covert activities on the world stage.
An exuberantly plotted, if uneven, entry in a promising thriller series.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477401392
Page Count: 382
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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