A refreshingly unconventional hero in a fitfully effective thriller.
A pathologist and toxicologist who moonlights as an Agency assassin gets recruited for an operation that hits devastatingly close to home in this thriller sequel.
Grigory Markovic, the Russian criminal “behind the biggest terror threat to this country,” is still out there, and he knows Dr. Lily Robinson’s identity. It has only been a few months since Robinson helped foil Markovic’s mass poisoning plot. Now, he’s looking to hook up with the North Koreans, who are conspiring with scientist Dr. Wei Guan, a Chinese middleman, to purchase his deadly new technology, which could unleash catastrophic chemical warfare. Robinson’s assignment from the Agency is to use her “encyclopedic knowledge of toxins” to kill Guan without obvious bloodshed. This is what she does on her “away time” from her job as a medical school professor and toxicology consultant. The assassinations are a clear violation of her Hippocratic oath, but the lives she saves allow her to rationalize the killings. It is also her way to stay busy to stem the guilt over losing her daughter years before while Robinson was on a field trip in the jungles of Colombia. “I wish I had my baby, my Rose,” she laments. “Someone to save the world for.” It is not too much of a spoiler to note that one of Robinson’s new students bears a resemblance to her. “There are so many loose ends to tie,” as one character notes at one point, and Magnani does an efficient job of juggling the backstory for those who did not read the first book in this fledgling series. The author also deftly manages a gallery of characters with the requisite suspicious motivations and allegiances, so many that Robinson disappears from the narrative for stretches at a time. (Her chapters are the only ones written in the first person, which can be distracting.) The science of toxins is well rendered, and Magnani crafts some indelible images (“The moon, full in the sky, round and bright, with a ribbon of dark clouds rippled across its face like the mask of the Lone Ranger”). But as the story reaches an emotional climax, readers may be inclined to agree with Robinson when she admits: “I’m not sure I can take any more revelations.”
A refreshingly unconventional hero in a fitfully effective thriller.Pub Date: March 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64599-165-6
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Encircle Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
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