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