An often entertaining series entry with several new and engaging characters.
Enigmatic programmer Vortmit returns in this second entry in Lytes’ thriller series, involving a drug dealer, a tech millionaire, and a pill-popping lawyer on the South Carolina coast.
After causing a car collision, real estate attorney Gretchen Donovan fakes her death rather than face a disciplinary board for embezzlement, jury tampering, bribery, and other misdeeds. Then a stranger approaches her, thinking she’s someone else, and asks, “Are you still okay to do the drop?” She receives a bag and a briefcase, but she’s unaware that they belong to drug-dealing criminal Garrison Buchan, who’s infuriated when the real pickup guy, Oscar, ends up empty-handed. Meanwhile, Gretchen’s estranged sister, Rainey, hopes to reconnect with her sibling. Vortmit wants Rainey’s popular, million-dollar app, Gotcha—specifically, its “GPS linked proprietary DNA identification software.” After Gretchen’s pill-induced fog wears off, she injects one of the syringes she finds inside the briefcase, which contain an unknown white substance. The cops already have eyes on Oscar, as they know that he’s working for a drug dealer. Adding to the chaos is Vortmit, who tries to take down Garrison on his own to “exact justice that society couldn’t”—and temporarily silence his own mysterious, violence-filled dreams. Vortmit, the star of the previous series installment, appears only sporadically here and has little bearing on the plot. Still, the other players are appealingly vibrant, including sympathetic Oscar, an eccentric psychic named Lenny, and Gretchen, who undergoes a transformation of sorts after repeated injections of the mysterious substance. Despite the large cast, Lytes provides a mostly easy-to-follow plot that’s frequently witty; at one point, for example, the third-person narration defines a breakup as a “sudden yank at the ejection seat of their relationship.” Some aspects are confusing, though, such as Vortmit’s murky backstory and the appearances of Raoul and Jose, who headline their own chapter before promptly vanishing from the novel.
An often entertaining series entry with several new and engaging characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 377
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
Lots of violent action with little payoff.
Jack Ryan Jr. is back to risk life and limb in saving a teenage girl from international killers while his father, U.S. President Jack Ryan Sr., figures out what to do with Iran’s clandestine uranium enrichment facility, hidden in a mine.
Junior, head of the secret intelligence outfit The Campus, which was functionally wiped out in Tom Clancy Flash Point (2023), is heading across Texas to a rendezvous with his fiancee, Lisanne Robertson, a one-armed former Marine and cop. He’s waylaid by the aftermath of a multi-vehicle accident that he discovers resulted from a gun attack that left a driver hanging on for life, and now puts Jack in the crosshairs of the gunmen. A tip leads him to a 4 a.m. meeting with Amanda, a single mom whose impetuous daughter, Bella, has run off with her highly undesirable boyfriend only to be abducted by the baddies. Meanwhile...in the nation’s capital, American surveillance has determined that Iran is on the cusp of nuclear armament. The only way to stop them is unleashing an unpiloted and untested super plane with massive destructive power. The book’s treatment of Iran’s “existential threat to the entire globe” as a subplot is rather curious, to say the least. You keep waiting for Bentley to connect the two stories, but that happens only superficially. Late in the book, we are told as an afterthought that Iran’s immediate threat had been “mitigated.” Unfortunately, there is no mitigation of the novel’s hackneyed prose—"The analytical portion of Jack’s brain couldn’t help but be impressed.”
Lots of violent action with little payoff.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422816
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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