A riveting story with compelling characters—catnip for thriller fans.
A stolen religious relic drives the action in Kelly’s globe-trotting thriller.
Biblical archaeologist Maggie Shepherd leads a team in Bari, Italy, to extract a religious icon depicting St. Nicholas that the pope hopes to give to the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church in Moscow. But the relic is purloined after its extraction by a man named Malachi Popov for the Russian mob, and soon after that, it’s stolen again. This leads to the unlikely pairing of Shepherd and Popov, who, after some soul-searching and observing what he believes to be the power of the relic, is determined to set things right. The story takes them to Moscow, the Vatican, and elsewhere around Italy as they work to unravel the secrets of the relic itself, determine who took it (and why), and whether it will be found in time for the pope’s visit to Moscow. Along the way, Shepherd and Popov must contend with the highest echelons of the Catholic Church and Russian mob to recover the relic while coming to terms with their own personal and religious issues. (Shepherd believes their partnership is preordained, as readers learn when Popov disappears and she searches for him: “She believed God had brought the two of them together to find answers, and they needed one another to finish their work.”) The text extends to more than 400 pages, but the narrative moves swiftly, a testament to Kelly’s storytelling abilities. The author excels at creating compelling personalities, not only for the main characters such as Shepherd and Popov, but also for the colorful supporting characters—no one seems superfluous. The standout is Shepherd, who is flawed, fascinating, and ultimately heroic; she is certainly worthy of further literary adventures. Reminiscent of Dan Brown’s work but with a tone and momentum all its own, Kelly’s yarn will delight thriller fans looking for an exciting read.
A riveting story with compelling characters—catnip for thriller fans.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781637632550
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forefront Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
