A diverting thriller featuring a shrewd, unorthodox spy.
An American college student becomes unwittingly embroiled in espionage in this debut novel.
University student Takis Soulivakis uses his intelligence for profit—charging people to write their papers. It’s relatively harmless work until two graduate student “clients” die from gunshots to the head. The students had published an article on Thomas Fielding, who had gone out in public after a false negative Covid-19 test. Though Takis’ name wasn’t on the article, he wrote and even researched most of it, interviewing a list of individuals a potentially infected Fielding had contact with. As Takis is positive this is why someone assassinated his clients, he eventually fears he’ll be next. Meanwhile, a United States agency investigates the murders and concentrates on Fielding’s contacts from the article, though what specifically it’s looking for isn’t immediately clear. Even as they suspect a ghostwriter, the agents won’t easily identify Takis, who prides himself on maintaining anonymity. This makes him perfectly suited for playing the spy game and staying ahead of anyone wanting to question him—or take him out. Takis ultimately teams up with Rachel Cullen, a client’s girlfriend, and, as covertly as possible, tries unmasking the killer before the culprit can track him down. Eglise’s tongue-in-cheek espionage tale puts an amateur spy in precarious circumstances. But while Takis and Rachel occasionally find themselves in undisputed danger, the story is consistently humorous. The protagonist, for example, who anonymously communicates with agents as “Nobody,” sets up a meeting at a local McDonald’s and cleverly manages to stay hidden. The narration likewise brims with smart quips: “Plagiarism was, at base, a foul thing, eroding what decency was left in the pliable young souls struggling to survive the wiles of innumerable errant professors.” Mystery (involving the unknown killer and a possible mole in the agency) drives much of the tale with surprises throughout, including unexpected details about Fielding’s contacts. The story culminates in a final act that, while somewhat muted, is certainly memorable.
A diverting thriller featuring a shrewd, unorthodox spy.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-81884-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Eglise Press
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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