A stellar cast gives this spy thriller gusto and panache.
In this third installment of an espionage series, an American intelligence operative, looking into a friend’s suspicious death, ends up enmeshed in a heinous international plot.
Spy Cat Powell has always felt there was something more to her best friend’s fatal accident four years ago. Maggie Marshfield’s final email to her pal referenced a mysterious guy with no further details. Things change when Cat’s sister finds Maggie’s hidden SD card. One photograph sends Cat to Sarajevo, where Maggie vacationed, to identify an unknown man—likely the guy in question. It turns out that he has ties to criminal acts that Cat, who co-leads a “multi-agency team,” struggles to expose. A flashback takes readers back decades to when Zlatan Terzić left Yugoslavia for America. By the 1990s, he had become a CIA asset; it was not entirely by choice, as the agency indirectly threatened his family in Sarajevo. His covert work took him to such places as London, Paris, and Germany—and to Maggie as well. But one of his decisions had disastrous, long-lasting consequences. In the present day, Cat hunts those behind Maggie’s death and a host of other sordid deeds, including both attempted and successful assassinations. Reynolds sets a measured pace that benefits her lengthy novel. She gradually introduces the cast as the story smoothly transitions between characters, years, and countries. As in preceding books, Cat is an indelible and capable hero. But supporting players also shine; Maggie is particularly appealing, while readers may hesitate to label sympathetic Zlatan a villain. Despite hints of action in the tale, the author tends to focus on the espionage side, such as hackers peeking through backdoors and Cat eluding a tail. This gripping, well-written narrative drops in a handful of surprises, like unexpected deaths, and culminates in a denouement both gratifying and realistic.
A stellar cast gives this spy thriller gusto and panache.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2021
ISBN: 979-8985169218
Page Count: 536
Publisher: Mirage Books
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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