An exhilarating companion piece to the first in the series.
Ancient languages professor Dr. Cloe Lejeune returns to stop an evil organization from locating a cave of oil jars crucial to the survival of Christianity in Mayhall’s (Judas the Apostle, 2013) latest religious thriller.
Cloe is translating parts of an old journal that may have been written by an apostle chronicling three years in the life of Christ. The documents were found in ancient oil jars, one bequeathed by her late father and the other from the Sicarii, a group protecting a cave reputedly filled with similar jars. Pope Francis enlists Cloe to find the elusive cave, since proof of the apostle’s diary might have the power to either confirm or refute the Gospels. He also hopes to find the cave before a villainous enterprise; Cloe has already dealt with its murderous leader, the Kolektor, but he’s gone, replaced by his former servant, the Karik, as well as a mysterious heir. Cloe, her military son, J.E., and Monsignor Albert Roques join Swiss Guards in tracking down the cave. The author’s novel is rife with mystery, as Cloe’s group uncovers a myriad of clues, from tunnels in the Church of St. John in France to a burial site in Tunisia, Africa. Mystery even surrounds some of the characters, particularly Miguel, who’s trailing the Karik (and by extension, Cloe and the others) for killing his family with a bomb intended for him; the reason he’s initially a target doesn’t come to light until later. Mayhall recaps his previous novel thoroughly but nonintrusively, opening with momentum (the Sicarii facing the advancing Romans in A.D. 70) and relaying the earlier plot in snippets as the story progresses. Cloe is a commendable protagonist, more than proving her worth intellectually but also handling herself physically; she shows that a high heel can be a weapon, too. While the strongest scenes involve Cloe’s making her way to the cave using the Sicarii’s cryptic signs and biblical verses, the novel has its share of action, including a plane that goes down and a standoff with gunfire and grenades. Once again, Mayhall wraps everything up quite nicely while leaving the story open for another sequel. Reading the preceding novel isn’t a requirement, though this volume will likely inspire readers to do so.
An exhilarating companion piece to the first in the series.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491721087
Page Count: 372
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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