The major lesson learned here is that Begley's crime series has run its course and was an ill-advised detour from its...
Hard-boiled meets high society in a novel of unspeakable horror among the unspeakably wealthy.
In the third (Kill and Be Killed, 2016, etc.) in a series of thrillers featuring Jack Dana—Marine hero–turned–bestselling novelist with a sideline of fighting high-level corruption—Begley continues to fall short of the incisive craftsmanship that earned him acclaim with more-literary novels such as About Schmidt (1996). Having dispensed with an evil nemesis at the end of Volume 2, Begley doesn’t even bother with a plausible successor or much of a plot. Instead, this is more of a wildly implausible addendum to the last novel, one in which Dana rationally realizes that “dead men don’t send messages or stage macabre Punch-and-Judy shows,” but he nevertheless finds himself enveloped within a scenario that seems masterminded from the grave. For those who missed the first two installments, the author provides recaps of every significant plot point while reintroducing stock characters such as the Asian manservant Feng, a “former member of the Hong Kong Police Force Special Duty Unit,” who would lay down his life for his boss and who is also a gourmet cook who makes a mean martini and is “the picture of Asiatic propriety.” Jack’s girlfriend is the international-lawyer daughter of a billionaire tycoon, not much interested in men until the comfort she found in Jack’s cuddling led to more. A household massacre that reminds everyone of Charles Manson, only worse, proceeds to extortion plots and kidnapping, all apparently designed to flush Jack from his lair of safety. But for what reason? To what end? Jack determines that it is he who will flush them out: “If these people want to have a go at me, let them. I may be able to teach them a lesson.”
The major lesson learned here is that Begley's crime series has run its course and was an ill-advised detour from its inception.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54494-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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