No matter how intense the action gets, the outcome, for better or worse, is never in doubt.
An emotional and highly deceptive plea entices forensic sculptor Eve Duncan from Atlanta to Africa, where all hell promptly breaks loose.
Journalist Jill Cassidy wants Eve to drop what she’s doing and book passage to the fictional country of Maldara, where an attack by Botzan rebels on a village school has left 27 children dead. Eve can render the bereaved parents a priceless service, urges Jill, if she uses her matchless skills to reconstruct busts of the deceased from their skulls, and she plies Eve with enough sob-story details to overcome her resistance. But she doesn’t tell Eve the truth, or at least not the whole truth. The real reason Jill and CIA agent Jed Novak want Eve to come is so she can determine that a 28th skull—that of mercenary Nils Varak—isn’t really Varak’s at all but another skull intended to make the world believe he’s dead. Eve, already stung by Jill’s deception, points out that the skull has tested positive for Varak’s DNA; Jill counters that it must have been faked. While Jill and Novak try to come up with evidence that would support their theory and Eve begins her painstaking reconstructive work on the skulls, Zahra Kiyani, who accepted the presidency of Maldara after her father, the incumbent, was assassinated, seizes more and more greedily the power she thinks is due her as a descendant of Cleopatra’s daughter Kiya and the country’s rightful queen. She uses her sexual dominance over U.N. diplomat Edward Wyatt to wring concessions from the international community and holds terse exchanges with an unseen party over what to do about this interloping American. How can Eve and her ragtag allies possibly prevail against such entrenched and well-armed adversaries? Readers who take this last question seriously are clearly newcomers to Johansen’s venerable franchise (Dark Tribute, 2019, etc.).
No matter how intense the action gets, the outcome, for better or worse, is never in doubt.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1308-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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