From Russia with Love meets Dr. Strangelove. Wellington has added a few twists of his own, but the rhetoric—“What could come...
Wellington wants those of you who haven’t kept up with the news to know that Cold War relics and new world order infighting have made the former Soviet Union a very dangerous place indeed.
Just because the USSR is no more doesn’t mean it’s not armed to the teeth. Consider the missile defense system Perimeter, which is programmed to automatically unleash a full-scale attack on the U.S. if it ever senses the approach of an American missile. Clearly, this dinosaur system, whose existence Russia never acknowledged, is a disaster waiting to happen, and Agent Nadezhda “Nadia” Asimova, of the Federal Service for Technic and Export Control of the Russian Federation, wants to stop it. And she wants one-armed Capt. Jim Chapel, of U.S. Military Intelligence, along to witness that the system has indeed been neutralized. After rescuing Chapel (Chimera, 2013) from detection when his routine deep-sea dive to recover a notebook from a long-sunken Soviet submarine off the Cuban coast goes unexpectedly wrong, she asks his boss, Rupert Hollingshead, to authorize his participation, a process that’s considerably eased when Julia Taggart, the girlfriend for whom he’s willing to quit the service to marry, walks out on him. Picking up Bogdan Vlaicu, the Romanian hacker who’ll tinker under the hood of the doomsday machine, the pair makes for remote Uzbekistan. Problem: They’re not the only parties to turn up on the scene in the middle of nowhere. Problem: Chapel’s growing attachment to Nadia threatens to compromise the mission. Problem: Nadia may not be exactly what she seems to be. The threats keep shifting, but the well-choreographed action, which requires a remarkably small cast, is nonstop.
From Russia with Love meets Dr. Strangelove. Wellington has added a few twists of his own, but the rhetoric—“What could come close to measuring up to the fate of the entire world?”—has changed remarkably little over half a century.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-224880-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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