An entertaining thriller with an overly convoluted plot.
A former CIA assassin turned minister races to stop a Byzantine terrorist plot in Carl’s thriller.
Top CIA hit man Adam Hunter’s final assignment went horribly wrong, resulting in the deaths of several innocent people (including his wife, Emma) instead of the intended target. Trying for a clean break from his past, he’s living a new life as a Protestant minister in a small Tennessee town near the Smoky Mountains, secretly struggling with guilt he can’t let go of and pining for lawyer Renie Ellis, who doesn’t know that he accidentally killed her fiance. A former colleague, Conrad Docherty, forces Adam into one more mission by threatening a close friend. To complete the mission, Adam must deliver a missing manuscript page from the Codex Sinaiticus, one of the earliest and most important copies of the Christian Bible, to the Vatican. The codex itself, taken from an ancient monastery in Egypt in the 19th century, is supposed to be in the British Museum, but Conrad has secretly arranged to steal it and sell it to the Russian Mafia, working with a terrorist mastermind known only as The Bedouin, who’s setting in motion a horrifying plot that will “make September 11 look like a picnic.” Meanwhile, the gentle, liberal Pope’s scheming right-hand man, Cardinal Lorenzo Carbonari, who hopes to succeed him and fears the manuscript could wreak havoc in the church, enlists his Sicilian Mafia connections to stop Adam from completing the mission. Pursued by assassins from the Smokies to Washington, D.C., Rome, Egypt, and Jerusalem, Adam races to decipher the meaning of the manuscript, prevent an international terrorist attack that could derail the global peace process, and protect Renie after Conrad also sends her to Rome. Subplots featuring top U.S. government officials, the secretary at Adam’s church, and a wealthy Greek shipping heiress who’s obsessed with the codex further complicate the narrative.
Carl is the author of several nonfiction books on religious topics; this is his first novel. His writing style is direct and informal, with vivid action scenes and touches of humor: A crowd on a rainy day is “a mushroom field of umbrellas popped up over a trench coat convention.” Despite his somewhat far-fetched career path, Adam is likable, always trying to do right even if that means performing CPR on a mortal enemy, and his romance with Renie softens his tough, no-nonsense persona. The minor characters are implausible (including a professor of classical Greek who’s never published anything and another professor of classical languages turned Mafia hit man) or one-dimensional, such as the Russian gangsters, a Mafia don, the British Museum guards, and a German-hired assassin. From brushes with death to helicopter rescues to high-speed car chases, things just keep happening, one after another, in quick succession without much foreshadowing or explanation, creating a narrative that’s fast-paced but sometimes confusing and less suspenseful than it could be. For readers willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the story, Carl’s debut thriller offers action-packed entertainment.
An entertaining thriller with an overly convoluted plot.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798987485507
Page Count: 384
Publisher: LeConte Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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