An enjoyable political thriller despite its flaws.
In this thriller, an FBI agent and a former New York Police Department detective investigate a conspiracy to tamper with a presidential election.
In 2024, the United States is riven by partisan dispute, cleaved into two acrimonious and irreconcilable halves, a mutual contempt expressed in the presidential election pitting Democratic candidate Katie Crandall against Republican candidate Bob Lutz. The political left believes a Republican victory would replace democracy with fascism, while the political right interprets a Democratic victory as the death of American values. David Flynn had to take a job as a deputy sheriff in Hamilton County, Ohio, after being kicked off the NYPD for accidentally shooting a Black youth. He uncovers evidence of intentional voter fraud affecting the vote counts in the battleground states of Ohio and Georgia—interference that might have led to a tipping of the electoral scales to Crandall. Flynn teams up with beautiful FBI agent Marla Devereaux—with her “exotic almond-shaped eyes” and “cheekbones any aspiring fashion model would kill for”—to quietly investigate a crime that could send the nation spiraling into civil war. Thompson conjures a political drama as electrifying as it is plausible, one that illuminates the fragility of the electoral system as well as the nation’s fractured psyche. The deeper the pair digs, though, the more it seems like the fraud they’ve discovered is part of a deeper conspiracy, one that transcends internecine polarization. The relationship between Flynn and Devereaux is microcosmic of the country’s angry division at first—she expects him to be a “Trump-loving troglodyte”—as he’s a lifelong Republican, and she’s a liberal Black woman. Their eventual (and predictable) romantic entanglement seems to point toward the possibility of greater political harmony on the national stage: a hopeful note in Thompson’s otherwise bleak vision.
The plot is frantically paced—it has the feel of a cinematic thriller, packed with action and intrigue. Furthermore, the author keenly documents the ways in which a generally prosperous nation can still suffer badly under the weight of gathering division. Thompson’s writing style is the weakest aspect of the book—it is antiseptically bland. He occasionally indulges in a sort of condescending didacticism, one that purveys well-worn, obvious lessons. Here is Flynn’s turn at sermonizing: “A nation’s policies should be based on reality, however unpleasant or inconvenient, or those policies are doomed to fail. When the truth no longer matters, demagogues, opportunists, and ideologues are free to fill the void with whatever lies and false narratives serve their purpose—and that’s never good for a nation.” These preachy platitudes threaten to undermine the book as a whole, although luckily this sort of collapse is narrowly avoided. However, this is not the kind of political meditation one finds in a book like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004)—a brilliant work of historical hypothesis. Rather, Thompson offers a dramatic page-turner, an eventful (if uneven) thriller based on a thoroughly intelligent premise. If read in this light, this is an entertaining novel, and even a touch more than that. An enjoyable political thriller despite its flaws.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 9780990686255
Page Count: 252
Publisher: NorLightsPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2022
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
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