All this, and much less, is played out against a generic Paris that, apart from the title and the dust jacket illustration,...
Attorney/CIA consultant/hotelier Stone Barrington whiles away the time waiting to see whether his good friend, pregnant first lady Katharine Lee, will be elected president by dodging death threats from the same old enemies relocated to the City of Light.
Stone is in Paris for the opening of l’Arrington, the latest in the chain of hotels memorializing his late wife. He’s sorry to say goodbye to his most recent inamorata, Lee’s deputy campaign director Ann Keaton, and he completely deflects the forthright advances of rapacious American ambassador Linda Flournoy. But there are other prospects in Paris, like dress designer Mirabelle Chance, whose only baggage is a father and brother who are both prefects of police, so naturally he succumbs to her. And to his sometime lover Holly Barker, whom CIA director Lance Cabot has sent to Paris just in case they run out of women there. But not to Katharine Lee, whose baby a scurrilous blogger accuses Stone of fathering even though they’re just good friends. The requisite violence is supplied by Yevgeny Majorov, who accurately suspects Stone of having a hand in his brother Yuri’s death when Yuri attempted to throw a lasso over Stone’s Los Angeles flagship (Doing Hard Time, 2013). Sleeker and smoother than Yuri, Yevgeny is equally determined to seize control of Stone’s latest hotel and additionally determined to avenge his brother’s death. Matters come to a head when one of Stone and Mirabelle’s trysts is interrupted by a masked gunman, but after Mirabelle shoots the intruder dead, there are surprisingly few complications.
All this, and much less, is played out against a generic Paris that, apart from the title and the dust jacket illustration, could have been St. Petersburg, Prague or Pittsburgh.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16912-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
The jaws are those of a shark which makes quick work of a pretty young woman on the Long Island shore (Amity) where the disaster is kept quiet in the (financial) interest of the town's summer rentals. This is no longer possible after the next victim—a youngster—and police chief Brody is wrongly blamed for not closing the beaches sconer. He has other troubles — namely a restless young wife who remembers better days playing country club tennis and she is not immune to a visiting ichthyologist, the only one fascinated by the local shark. The finale entails some ugly, lashing action against the big one that's been getting away and all of it is designed to jolt that maneating masculine readership who probably won't notice that it ""should of"" been better written.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1973
ISBN: 978-0-345-54414-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
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