Highly recommended to readers who don’t have enough to worry about already—or who’d rather swap their cares for bigger ones.
The bounty hunters of St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking who go up against a Middle Eastern terrorist bomber find their target far more chimerical than it seems.
The serial kidnapper that ex–U.S. Marshal Michael Finnigan and his partner, Katalin Fiero Dahar, tangled with in St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking (2019) is small potatoes compared to the Khamsin Sayef, or Storm of the Sword, a terrorist organization that blew up Paris CIA station chief Dinah Mariner and her husband and daughter three years ago and has gone on to more of the same. The latest casualty is nongovernmental organization leader Victor Wu, killed along with Pete Newsom, the contractor with Sooner Slye and Rydell responsible for keeping him safe. When senior European CIA director Annie Pryor, an old friend of Dinah and her family's, hires Spanish spymaster Hugo Llorente to identify and kill the parties responsible, Llorente naturally reaches out to Fiero, whom he formerly handled in the field, and her partner to fulfill the contract. Annie Pryor isn’t the only one who takes this mission personally. Col. Cole Sanger, of Sooner Slye and Rydell, knowing that his firm’s reputation for protecting important people is on the line, resolves that nobody will pull the trigger but SS&R’s own hirelings—either one of their regular employees or Syarhey Valazko, a colorless Belarussian who lives only for his work. As it turns out, the assassins’ race to the target turns out to be only Act 1 of a plot Haynes manages with professional dexterity and an uncanny sense of when to dish out more twists, deceptions, and action sequences.
Highly recommended to readers who don’t have enough to worry about already—or who’d rather swap their cares for bigger ones.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-409983-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
A fascinating genre mashup for the discerning—and reflective—mystery reader.
A young Indian American man finds himself playing detective when a murder interrupts his relaxing vacation.
In some possibly extraneous backstory, Ro Krishna attends a pair of birthday parties in Bermuda and in London, where we learn that he and his friends are highly educated, affluent, glamorous jet-setters. Ro is trying to recover from a mysterious traumatic experience at his most recent job, so he decides to take some time off and spend the Christmas holidays at Samsara, a luxury Ayurvedic spa in India, surrounded by friends both old and new. When a guest is murdered, Ro finds himself helping the local inspector, the hotel’s eccentric owner, and an embedded CIA agent solve the crime, as well as the subsequent ones that follow. There are tongue-in-cheek references to Agatha Christie, who may have provided inspiration for the cozy surroundings and frequent musings about class, wealth, and race, but the dialogue is fully contemporary, as is Ro. The novel takes a while to get going; the story would have benefited from a tighter, faster beginning that plunged straight into the action at Samsara. The moments of foreshadowing leading to the murder feel somewhat heavy-handed. But the easy rapport of the people at the spa creates a lovely foundation for the psychological intrigue of the mystery. One minute someone can be making off-color jokes about death, and the next Ro is dealing with very real grief. Though he often claims to feel alone, Ro’s involvement with the rest of the characters creates sympathy, humor, and complexity, and it’s the interactions within the different pairs and groups that make the narrative flow—as well as some well-timed twists.
A fascinating genre mashup for the discerning—and reflective—mystery reader.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780063319301
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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