Cussler’s plots sometime slip outside of the box of believability, but he’s always entertaining.
Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna offered a mega-fortune in jewels while attempting to ransom Czar Nicholas II and his family from the Bolsheviks, but she certainly didn’t expect those riches to finance a Nazi Fourth Reich.
That won’t happen if Sam and Remi Fargo have any say in the matter. Cussler and Burcell (Pirate, 2016) imagine that World War II Nazis later seized what they call the Romanov Ransom, riches hidden away in the Catherine Palace by the Soviet government. After Germany's defeat, Operation Werewolf sent hardcore Nazis down the real-life “ratline” to South America. Cussler expands that history to suppose the ransom was meant to finance a Nazi revival there. The Fargos become involved because they helped finance documentarians investigating the ratline and then receive word the young filmmakers are missing. They make quick work of finding them in the Atlas Mountains, at the same time uncovering clues to the ransom's whereabouts. Soon the Fargos are shooting it out with the die-hard Nazi Wolf Guard in Marrakesh and then Königsberg. Later, as the Fargos continue to trace the lost ransom, they battle more Guard members in Buenos Aires, in the drug-lord–infested Argentine jungle, and finally on a lost Andes peak where a crashed WWII–era Avro Lancastrian holds more than one frozen secret. This intercontinental shoot, stab, and chase is complicated by a German businessman’s greed, a broken Enigma code machine, mummified corpses, and Russian spies apparently playing both sides of the street. Character development is nil. Bad guys are thoroughly worth a bullet. The exotic and sometimes-beautiful scenery gets photo-caption–length descriptions. Nevertheless, tension never lets up and no fan of the genre will stop turning pages, the entire tome made better by heavy-with-facts research right down to the names of priceless Fabergé eggs: Hen with Sapphire Pendant Egg, Royal Danish Egg, Empire Nephrite Egg, and the Alexander III Commemorative Egg.
Cussler’s plots sometime slip outside of the box of believability, but he’s always entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57554-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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