A gripping, literate page-turner.
Thau’s debut is a rip-roaring historical thriller set in Theodore Roosevelt’s America.
It’s the first decade of the last century. Theodore Roosevelt has just become president in the wake of William McKinley’s assassination at the hands of a disgruntled Pole, Leon Czolgosz, and Roosevelt has big plans; he wants to build the nation’s Navy, project American power abroad and re-establish the United States as a major player on the world stage. But there are those who plot his demise—anarchists who think the national interests Roosevelt promotes are little more than a pretext for exploiting the working poor. With the future of the country hanging in the balance, an unlikely pair race across the landscape, fleeing for their lives. Matthew Stanton—disguised as a priest—runs from those who would pin the last president’s death on him. And Alyssa Harding, née Coolidge, strives to escape the clutches of her sadistic husband, whom she married, it seems, only to fulfill her mother’s dying wish. As their lives collide on a Chicago-bound train, both are thrust into an unlikely struggle against anarchists, police officers, politicians and unhinged Wall Street barons. However, the greatest strength of Thau’s tale is not its fantastical excess, but its absolute plausibility. His historical fiction holds up to scrutiny, and he gives his story the look and feel of turn-of-the-century America. Similarly, his protagonists are eccentric but believable. The gorgeous Alyssa is no mere distressed damsel, and the mysterious Matthew is a clever update on that old stock figure, the man-with-a-past. Both these two, and a supporting cast of dozens, come to life with the help of Thau’s vibrant but thoroughly economical prose. He uses his words more carefully than early 20th-century stock speculators spent their money, and his novel reaps the profits.
A gripping, literate page-turner.Pub Date: July 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450225908
Page Count: 301
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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
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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