Zero mystery, zero ingenuity, very little suspense. But Woods mostly keeps his eye on the ball, which elevates this...
New York lawyer Stone Barrington, who’s slept his way through 30 fleet, mindless suspensers, comes a cropper with his latest conquest.
In fact, you can’t really call insurance investigator Crane Hart a conquest, since she comes on so strong during the visit she pays Stone's Turtle Bay home to discuss the $500,000 he lost over his most recent inamorata (Standup Guy, 2014) that they’ve retired to his boudoir before the visit is over. It’s only then that the complications begin. Crane isn’t quite divorced after all; her husband, private eye Don Dugan, gets just as fixated on Stone as his wife is, though not in the same way; and despite the best legal help Stone can provide, the estranged couple end up reuniting. Stone would be inconsolable if it weren’t for Ann Keaton, personnel director for first lady Katherine Lee’s presidential campaign, who obligingly follows the tracks in his bedroom carpet, but not before thieves interrupt a swanky party at Ann’s place and relieve most of the high-profile guests of their glitter. Could Dugan be behind the daring robbery? Could he be conspiring with his on-again spouse to worm security information out of well-placed male targets and then put it to larcenous use? Woods can’t resist interrupting this tale for brief, irrelevant glimpses into the lives of semiregulars Teddy Fay, the CIA operative who went spectacularly rogue before he got a secret presidential pardon, and Holly Barker, the CIA assistant director who orders all records of him expunged from the nation’s intelligence database, and for occasional reports on the fortunes of Katherine Lee’s campaign.
Zero mystery, zero ingenuity, very little suspense. But Woods mostly keeps his eye on the ball, which elevates this installment well above the run of his recent work.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16416-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.
The 10th and latest Sam and Remi Fargo adventure (The Romanov Ransom, 2017, etc.) is a fast-paced tale that reaches back to the early days of automotive glory.
In Manchester, England, in 1906, the Gray Ghost has gone missing. That’s the Rolls-Royce prototype developed by Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, and the loss threatens to financially ruin them. They hire a detective to locate it, but he is murdered. In the present day, Sam and Remi Fargo hear about the car, which turned up after World War II but is now missing again. It's always been owned by the Payton family, which generations ago was the Oren-Payton family, and may be worth many millions of dollars. Raising the stakes even higher, the 1906 thieves may have hidden treasure inside the car, though there was no trace of it when the Gray Ghost was found after the war. But jealous modern-day cousin Arthur Oren has the car stolen and then loses track of it—has the thief he hired stolen it twice? It’s a complicated and clever plot, with Sam and Remi trying to find it for the current owner, Lord Albert Payton, Viscount Wellswick. The 1906 journal of Jonathon Payton, fifth Viscount Wellswick, provides a solid backstory. The Fargos are great series characters, whip-smart and altruistic self-made multimillionaires who can afford to take time from their charity work to dabble in dangerous adventures. Oren knows they’re involved, and he wants them both dead and the car returned. An accomplice suggests first making the Fargos destitute by freezing their bank accounts and credit cards. Then the bad guys can arrange a fake suicide. It’s fun to watch Sam and Remi get out of dicey scrapes, once by driving an Ahrens-Fox pumper fire engine out of a blazing building. Oren asks, “How hard is it to knock off two socialites?” He finds out the hard way; he should have just acquainted himself with Cussler’s series.
Thriller fans will delight in this latest escapade. Cussler and co-author Burcell have delivered a winner.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1873-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
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