Hardcore action here. Greaney and the Gray Man are on their game.
The Gray Man dodges death and whups the bad guys for the 12th time in this nonstop thriller.
A banker steals records from his Swiss employer, hoping to expose corruption. He stores the information on a burner phone, and everybody wants it—not least the Russians and the CIA. Court Gentry, the man of many monikers—the Gray Man, Violator, and Six—is pulled off his job of blowing up “oligarchs’ big toys,” i.e., their mega-yachts, to help find the phone. He’s ex–CIA, and now he’s a freelancer, “only taking contracts he thought to be principled.” There’s excitement even before the main plotline as limpets spread shock waves under the sea. Meanwhile, he pines for his erstwhile lover Zoya Zakharova, the ex–SVR agent who’d once tried to kill him until their hormones kicked in. Now she feels adrift, her only companions being bottles of vodka and lines of cocaine. And wouldn't you know, a phone call pulls her from her stupor. If you’re not too damn drunk, a voice tells her, we need you to find a phone with stolen banking information before anyone else gets their hands on it. Paraphrasing Casablanca: Of all the plotlines in all the thrillers in all the world, Zoya walks into Violator’s. But the two assassins meet under the most incommodious of circumstances. Hmm. Do they kiss or kill? Hint: This isn't a romance novel. Readers will have great fun as Gentry manages to survive, sometimes in implausible ways. You'll think he is done for on a Swiss train until you see there are 200 pages to go and remember that he's the series hero. So no spoilers there. But that train ride provides the story’s most riveting action until the blazing finale. Series fans already know that the CIA, specifically Suzanne Brewer, has a kill order out for Gentry. Brewer has always been a scheming antagonist, but now she truly reveals the darkness of her character. Not much is predictable but for the actions of CIA agent Angela Lacy, who has never shot anyone before and is loath to do so now. Alert readers will be thinking, Come on Angela! You can do it!
Hardcore action here. Greaney and the Gray Man are on their game.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-54810-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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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