An overly complex tale that will elicit thrills and bewilderment in equal measure.
In the third installment of McCrone’s thriller series, an FBI agent struggles to foil a plot to commandeer the executive branch of the United States government.
In 2017, Special Agent Imogen Trager hears a press announcement that’s shocking but also predictable, given the massive political conspiracy that she thwarted in McCrone’s previous book, Faithless Elector (2016). President Diane Redmond has suddenly died, and in advance of an autopsy, the official line is that the cause was a heart attack. But Imogen and her boyfriend (and former college professor) Duncan Calder immediately suspect foul play. With his help, she was able to expose a vast scheme to rig a presidential election—one that ultimately resulted in the deaths of members of the Electoral College, among others. Now there aren’t many substantive leads for Imogen to follow, but there is one man that she knows is somehow involved—Frank Reed, who’s shadily connected to several fundraising political-action committees. He’s on the run from his co-conspirators and may be willing to help in exchange for protection. At the end of this exasperatingly complex plot, which even the narration concedes is a “Byzantine tangle,” is a mysterious villain known as the “Postman,” a nefarious businessman with an “ultimate vision” to establish a “nation ruled by kleptocrats, a democracy in name only.” In this latest series entry, Imogen remains a memorable protagonist—a “bookish” and “formal” intellectual who’s as tough as she is smart. In addition, the book has a highly cinematic quality to it, with plenty of action along the way. However, it’s tediously convoluted and breathlessly melodramatic, and readers will likely find that it doesn’t work very well as a stand-alone, apart from its predecessors. Readers will never be bored, but they may often find themselves lost—or in need of a spreadsheet to keep the deluge of details straight.
An overly complex tale that will elicit thrills and bewilderment in equal measure.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 299
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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