A vividly written work of fiction shows the enduring effects of the war in Southeast Asia on its characters.
Shanks’ debut mystery, set during the so-called secret war in Laos, melds love and war stories in a novel with a plot as tangled as the jungles that provide a backdrop.
Just out of flight school in America, Andy Harris can’t believe his luck when Operation Pegasus, based in Udon, Thailand, is willing to give him a shot as a pilot for a U.S. Army combat helicopter, flying sorties over the border into Laos. The assistant chief pilot, Maj. John Pike, a legend in the outfit, is skeptical, but the newcomer’s skills win Pike over, and he becomes Andy’s mentor. On his second day at work, Andy meets and falls in love with the beautiful Fon Wattana, a young Thai woman. But she is engaged to Nate O’Riley. Although older than the others, middle-aged Nate is tolerated by his mates because of his unquestioned bravery and flying skills. At one point, Fon is willing to break the engagement to Nate, but her fiance had saved Andy’s life, so he balks at the offer. Years later, Pike—alcoholic, half-demented—finally lays bare the truth about a tragedy revealed in the first pages that had gnawed the crew at every yearly reunion: Someone had gunned down Nate and Fon on their wedding day, but why? As the story toggles between the events of the early 1970s and Andy’s return to Thailand 20 years later, it’s hard to believe that this is Shanks’ debut novel. He says he worked on it for more years than he cares to admit, and it shows in the best way. Clearly Shanks knows his subject. He goes into minute details of flying a helicopter, and battle scenes are hairy and scary. He also shows what war can do to gung-ho warriors. In one appalling scene, the crew of Andy’s helicopter makes sport of a mortally wounded Viet Cong down below, as if they are playing an arcade game. Andy is repulsed by the madness. “Patriotism” gets a rough workout here.
A vividly written work of fiction shows the enduring effects of the war in Southeast Asia on its characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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