A tale of white-collar crime that crackles with energy.
In this debut thriller, an American banker’s business trip to Paris finds him unwittingly entangled in an embezzler’s deadly revenge plot.
Paul Hart’s boss at Calhoun Capital in New York, James Hutchens, sends him to Paris to take a closer look at Renard Industries. CEO Claude Renard is a client at Calhoun, but as his current holdings are “minimal,” Hutchens wants him to move more money to the American company. Once in Paris, Hart initially meets Renard’s director of affairs, Clara Nouvelle, who essentially vets him on her boss’s behalf. Hart is understandably anxious. He has no strategy for gathering information on Renard Industries, and Hutchens has even implied that Hart’s career is at stake. But Hart finds solace in Clara, and he falls for the beguiling, self-assured woman in no time. The business trip takes an unexpected turn after Clara and Hart head to London for “a black-tie charity auction.” It’s an opportunity for Hart to meet associates of Renard’s, including his London banker, Igor Romanski. Hart doesn’t trust Igor, in part for his apparent smugness and aggressive mannerisms. But readers know that Igor has been embezzling money and laundering it for quite some time in London. And he has even bigger plans, including some type of revenge that includes an attack. As Igor’s scheme soon entails outright murder, Hart is in imminent danger. He also realizes that someone’s deception has put him in trouble with the Parisian authorities, and he may have to clear his name, provided he can stay alive. Though Flynn’s novel has little action or suspense, the plot moves at a steady clip. Hart is in Paris relatively quickly while his romance with Clara is almost instantaneous. The protagonist’s backstory is captivating: Dating Hutchens’ daughter, Veronica, led to his Calhoun job. Despite Veronica dumping Hart, Hutchens has continued to employ him. This makes Hart a vulnerable and sympathetic character, especially in light of Hutchens vaguely threatening his position at Calhoun. Although Hart concentrates on and periodically ogles Clara’s physical traits, she is a resourceful character whose many attributes gradually come to light, especially in the final act. The author shrewdly keeps the characters to a minimum and the story largely free of complications, like extraneous subplots. While this approach produces a clearly defined good guy and bad guy (Hart and Igor), there’s an overall wariness among other characters. More than one individual, for example, has been keeping secrets from Hart. Those secrets ultimately result in several plot twists, though at least a couple are ones readers will easily predict. Still, that doesn’t hamper the action when it finally arrives in the form of a shootout, a car chase, and more. Throughout the book, Flynn rigorously details environments, like scenes in London: “Continuing towards the Thames, they emerged from the smaller, narrow streets into an open square….Apartments were being refurbished, and dumpsters and heavy machinery were scattered about, the old brick buildings surrounding them looking in dire need of repair.”
A tale of white-collar crime that crackles with energy.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Papillon Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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