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CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER

The Great Clancy Thriller Machine rumbles on, engines on full. This time out, the best-selling ace swivels his big guns away from his usual Russian targets (glasnost fallout?) and toward a nearly homegrown menace: the cocaine lords of Colombia and their deadly white powder. So complex, so intricately researched and detailed is Clancy's newest battle plan that his main hero—CIA-agent Jack Ryan, veteran of three past Clancy novels—doesn't appear until about 100 pages of this 500-page juggernaut have rolled by. That's no problem, though: the front of the novel, like the rest, is built of geared subplots, each of which has teeth enough to snag the reader. The stirring action begins in the White House, in a typical Clancy scene that not only sets up the premise—a radical American initiative against Colombian drug traffic—but also offers nifty inside-info: that the Oval Office's windows are made of light-distorting, bullet-resistant polycarbonate; that the President's chair is backed with bullet-proof DuPont Kevlar. Neither the detailing nor the action lets up as Clancy moves his focus to the high seas—where a Coast Guard skipper captures, tries, and mock-executes a pair of drug-smuggling pirates; to the Rockies—where an ace Ranger trains for a secret mission with other Hispanics under the gaze of dark-souled CIA-agent "Mr. Clark"; to Medellin—where a vile drug lord and his ex-KGB advisor counterplot against the Yanks; to Langley—where a newly promoted Ryan gets wind of the White House plan and its murderous excesses by the hand of a cruelly ambitious presidential advisor. Before the dust Clears, America will secretly invade Colombia; drug lords will assassinate the US attorney general; America will bomb Medellin; and many more will die as Ryan and Clark kill lots of drug lords and serfs to save American boys and honor. Dazzling macho-entertainment, and a rousing farewell present to his fans from the author—who now, as he has announced, caps (for how long?) his astonishingly popular pen.

Pub Date: July 1, 1990

ISBN: 0425122123

Page Count: 642

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1989

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THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.

Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Pub Date: July 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

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THE A LIST

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...

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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.

Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?

Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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