Readers will finish the book, but their memories of Matthews' brilliant and fearless heroine will linger well past the final...
The third and final installment of Matthews’ (Palace of Treason, 2015, etc.) Red Sparrow series delivers a wallop on all fronts, from adrenaline-charged action to dark political intrigue to gripping emotional stakes.
Former sparrow Dominika Egorova is back. Trained to sexually entrap promising targets to spy on behalf of Russia, Dominika has risen to the rank of colonel in the counterintelligence section of the SVR, the external Russian foreign intelligence service. But back in 2005, before she evolved into a rising star in the Soviet spy agency—and a double agent, feeding information to the CIA—Dominika sexually compromised a U.S. Navy lieutenant named Audrey Rowland, never anticipating that their encounter would one day spark a lethal chain of events. Hating her role as SVR seductress, Dominika embraced her new secret identity as DIVA, one of the CIA’s premiere foreign assets. As Audrey, entrenched in her position as a Russian mole, courts a North Korean scientist willing to hand over secrets about the country’s arsenal, she passes the U.S.’s most sensitive weapons technology to Moscow. The Kremlin, eager to take advantage of Audrey’s position, hatches a risky plot to assassinate the CIA director and replace him with now-Vice Adm. Audrey Rowland. The American traitor operates under the code name MAGNIT, her identity as tightly guarded as that of her counterpart. Dominika and her lover, CIA operative Nate Nash, must put their relationship on the back burner to uncover MAGNIT’s identity or risk DIVA’s exposure. The novel is rich in spycraft that treats readers like insiders, with witty, memorable dialogue and emotional consequences that go far beyond most books in this genre—and Matthews stuffs his always hungry characters with onions, garlic, and personalities that make the last of this trilogy both satisfying and bittersweet.
Readers will finish the book, but their memories of Matthews' brilliant and fearless heroine will linger well past the final page.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4008-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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