Strong, skillful female warriors headline this rousing sequel.
A computer geek teams up with a black ops group to recover superconductive material in this second installment of a thriller series.
After spotting an intruder in her San Francisco loft, Maddy Marshall first protects 10-year-old AJ, the boy she hopes to adopt. Unfortunately, the culprit absconds with the ancient star chart she had been keeping safe. This chart may be the key to recovering a superconductive meteorite, which would fuel a quantum computer. As the thief may have been Russian, it’s a national security risk since the Russians would likely use such a computer for an American invasion. Alfred Bowman, director of VanOps, assigns Maddy’s boyfriend, Bear Thorenson, to find the meteorite as well as investigate the possibly related murder of an Indian ambassador. Joining Bear are VanOps members Jarmilla “Jags” Agiashvili and Maddy’s twin, Will Argones. Maddy becomes part of the team, too. Though only a civilian, she has an aikido black belt and belongs to the Order of the Invisible Flame, an ancient sect of royal spies that her family founded. This mission necessitates enlisting the help of archeoastronomer Anu Kumar; deciphering hieroglyphics on an important relic that Maddy possesses; and dodging tenacious assassins. Maddy and Jags are delightfully capable and convincingly vulnerable characters. But while the two women’s combat scenes are exhilarating, the story ultimately turns into a series of seemingly endless assaults or assassination attempts the team must face. Nevertheless, the final act is decidedly more intense while the brisk narrative traverses the globe to such places as Turkey, Egypt, and Africa. Centrae provides Maddy with numerous dilemmas, as she debates an offer to officially join VanOps (she’s concerned it would put AJ in persistent danger) and deals with Bear’s envy over her ex-fiance, Vincent, who, to some extent, is still in her life.
Strong, skillful female warriors headline this rousing sequel. (author’s notes, acknowledgements, author bio)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73496-625-1
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Thunder Creek Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A novel that delivers pretty much everything Silva’s fans want.
Silva takes his hero to where this bestselling series began.
Fans have gotten used to a new Gabriel Allon book every summer. Anyone wondering what the former head of Mossad might be doing during the war in Gaza will not find an answer here. This is bad news, maybe, for readers who appreciate Silva’s engagement with real-world politics, but it’s good news for those looking to this series for escape. This narrative is set in motion by the death of an art historian trying to reconnect a Picasso painting stolen by the Nazis with its rightful owner. Allon is drawn into this mystery by an old acquaintance from Cornwall, the place where he tried to escape his past and where readers first met him in The Kill Artist (2000). As he did in The Collector (2023), the author focuses on Allon’s connections to the art world, rather than his tenure as an assassin and intelligence operative. None of this is to say that Allon doesn’t make use of spycraft and his network of powerful international contacts. Although longtime fans may miss their favorite members of his old crew, there are plenty of familiar characters here. Allon enlists the help of hacker and master thief Ingrid Johansen and violin virtuoso Anna Rolfe. And it’s Timothy Peel—all grown up—who asks Allon for help investigating a seemingly simple case of murder that isn’t simple at all. All of this is fun enough, but it also feels a bit static. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022), Allon whipped up passable forgeries of works by Renaissance masters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese in a matter of days. Here, his plan for recovering a Picasso requires him to produce convincing lost paintings by modernists and postmodernists with wildly different styles. The glimpses into Allon’s family life also feel rote. Silva’s fans know that Chiara can do much more than cook and smile while her husband goes off on his adventures.
A novel that delivers pretty much everything Silva’s fans want.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063384200
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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