Real-life experience translated into page-turning fiction.
New hell has been visited upon war-torn Afghanistan in Young’s (Silent Enemy, 2011, etc.) latest action adventure tale.
A devastating earthquake has struck. Villages are left in rubble. Thousands are homeless, exposed and in need of rescue or relief. Into the breach goes U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Parson, a decorated combat veteran now working as a liaison with the Afghan Air Force. Parson is an experienced navigator and airlift pilot, but even though he isn’t a “rotorhead,” Parson is working with Capt. Rashid and his crew flying a Soviet-built Mi-17 helicopter. In assisting in organizing and administrating effective Afghan flying units, Parson has requested the help of a colleague from another combat service, Army Sgt. Maj. Sophia Gold, a skilled translator of the Pashto language. The two are soon tossed into a chaotic situation. A Taliban splinter group, the Black Crescent led by Bakht Sahar, known as Chaaku (knife in Pashto), is killing aid workers, disrupting delivery of supplies and, worst of all, taking children hostage to be used as suicide bombers. Young writes solidly about the complex dynamics of Afghan-American interaction. He also explores social differences by having Gold become a vital link in the attempt to wheedle information from one of the wives of Mullah Durrani, veteran of the mujahedin and the Taliban, grown too old to fight. In fact, Gold arranges a clandestine meeting and goes on a rogue mission to see Durrani. From there, she develops information that leads to the discovery of Chaaku’s fortress redoubt. Young is an Iraqi-Afghan war veteran, and he treats Afghan allies with due respect, acknowledges difficulties in bridging the gap between cultures and crafts a bad guy worth shooting. His grasp of military terminology, esoteric paraphernalia and ethos are spot-on, but don’t expect a ratcheted-up, loss-of-city narrative standard in a Tom Clancy or Dan Brown thriller. The slam-bang, good-guys-win conclusion comes with a well-described battle at Kuh-e Qara Batar, Chaaku’s mountain lair.
Real-life experience translated into page-turning fiction.Pub Date: July 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15846-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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