So long as readers understand they’ll need to buy the sequel (at least!) to learn America’s fate, they’ll enjoy this...
The latest hair-raising volume featuring U.S. Navy hero Dan Lenson (Tipping Point, 2015, etc.).
Two years into a multinational war with the People’s Empire of China and the U.S. as the main combatants, the U.S. is in serious trouble. China has already launched a thermonuclear strike that wiped out an American battle group in Hawaii along with 10,000 people. The U.S. does not respond in kind, fearing escalation into total thermonuclear war. Indeed, Chinese leader Zhang threatens to nuke the continental U.S. if the Americans push too hard. Meanwhile, Dan Lenson is missing in action with little hope he’ll be found, but he survives and is soon back on duty and deep in the midst of a truly high-tech war. The Chinese have destroyed communications satellites and conducted sophisticated cybersabotage, for example causing the U.S. to manufacture defective turbine blades essential for their battle cruisers. Both sides have combat robots, but plenty of human blood still flows. The war is fought on a wide-ranging stage from Iran to the mid-Pacific, and Lenson tries to help win it without a “massive thermonuclear exchange.” Deep inside China, a small American force led by Navy SEAL Teddy Oberg hopes to destroy a target and turn the war’s tide. The Vietnamese army (on our side!) desperately tries to fend off a Chinese assault while Marine Sgt. Hector Ramos fights in Taiwan. The USS Savo Island, veteran of several Lenson tales, is damaged and Capt. Cheryl Stuarulakis must scuttle it. There’s ample action for thriller readers, with terrific extended battle scenes on a grand scale, both on land and sea. But the story simply stops midaction, so it’s not quite the one-and-done novel readers might hope for. That abrupt pause is the tale’s only disappointment—the author could have resolved something—but Lenson’s legion of fans will be glad to know that the series is far from finished.
So long as readers understand they’ll need to buy the sequel (at least!) to learn America’s fate, they’ll enjoy this exciting story.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10110-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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