Not the slam-dunk it might have been, but a worthwhile sophomore entry in a promising action franchise.
A stone-cold killer returns from the dead to stop a plot to launch a holy war.
Pseudonymous British author Cain (The Accident Man, 2008) resurrects hit man Samuel Carver for another gritty adventure. As the novel opens, Carver is still recovering in a Swiss hospital, his mind splintered by torture. Struggling to pay for his care, his lover Alix Petrova reluctantly accepts a new assignment from Olga Zhukovskaya, her former handler in Russia’s intelligence service. Petrova’s mission: to cozy up to a renegade American soldier, Lt. General Kurt Vermulen, determined to defend his country from Islamic jihadists—at any price. She discovers Vermulen is key to a scheme financed by dying Texas oil baron and psychotic religious convert Waylon McCabe, who barely survived a plane crash orchestrated by Carver five years ago. The cabal’s goal is to incite a global war between Christianity and Islam by dropping a nuclear weapon on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The sequel’s commencement is a little sluggish, mostly because it takes Petrova’s absence to shock Carver into motion and nearly a quarter of the book to concoct Cain’s multifaceted conspiracy. The theatrical villains are a trifle over the top too, but Cain remains particularly adept at writing post-Bourne action sequences, and Carver is a first-rate action hero. Once the icy killer is jolted back to life, the story takes off rapidly with an aborted assassination attempt in Carver’s hospital room, a grueling training sequence in Norway and a healthy dose of spycraft as Carver and Petrova maneuver their way toward the conspiracy’s inner circle. Throw in a nail-biting stealth mission to secure the codes to the stolen suitcase bombs and an 11th-hour airborne endeavor to prevent Armageddon and the book makes for one hell of a weekend’s worth of entertainment.
Not the slam-dunk it might have been, but a worthwhile sophomore entry in a promising action franchise.Pub Date: March 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02049-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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