Memorable characters headline this absorbing (despite its dawdling pace) international thriller.
In Van Le’s debut novel, the first in a trilogy, an English Canadian geologist in West Africa finds himself a captive of jihadists.
Geologist Jake Hall works at Maranga Goldfields, a Canadian “junior” mining company. When his boss sends him to the firm’s Mali headquarters to check on a colleague’s gold exploration project, Hall discovers that the man has been injured and that his pregnant wife, Ayesha, has been abducted. While searching for the woman, Hall himself is taken and winds up in a jihadist group’s clutches. His captors want his company, or perhaps the Canadian government, to fork over a tidy ransom for Hall’s release. But when no one seems willing to pay, the jihadists go another route, determined to find a way to squeeze money out of Maranga Goldfields’ gold mine in Mali; surely, their geologist captive has the know-how and inside information to help them score a hefty payday. There’s no telling how things will play out when the jihadists team up with a North Africa–based ethnic group, the very same one that’s holding Ayesha hostage. Van Le’s story hits the ground running with a daring kidnapping and Hall stumbling into the bloody aftermath. (“In less than sixty seconds, the men had shoved the woman on top of the saddle, mounted their animals, and trotted off into the darkness with their prize.”) The bulk of the novel, however, lingers on Hall’s and Ayesha’s dual internments. This material entails much stagnant philosophical discourse, debates about ransom, and repetitive condemnations of Western religion and politics. Still, the cast is wonderfully diverse, from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police contemplating a rescue attempt to the various groups in North and West Africa, including the Tuareg and Arabs. The standout character is Ayesha, a Muslim woman who finds common ground with her fellow French hostage, Marion, a devout Christian; both are admirably strong women who defy numerous threats while in captivity. The author, who ably details colorful landscapes and harsh desert terrain, builds to a frenzied final act, upon which a sequel will most assuredly elaborate.
Memorable characters headline this absorbing (despite its dawdling pace) international thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781738305803
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Sattva Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© 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.
