As in Monarch’s debut (Rogue, 2012), veteran Sullivan throws every popcorn-movie cliché you can think of into the mix. The...
Who you gonna call when a dastardly terrorist cabal kidnaps the foreign ministers of China, India and the U.S.? Master thief and CIA alum Robin Monarch, of course. He’ll shake things up for sure.
When Secretary of State Agnes Lawton is snatched, together with her Indian and Chinese counterparts, from a hush-hush meeting aboard the oil tanker Niamey, her husband, Bill, strenuously opposes President Robert Sand’s plan to pay Monarch and his team $15 million to rescue her. But it’s actually a bargain, since the Sons of Prophecy, who claim responsibility, demand $500 million, plus the release of all political prisoners, for each of their three hostages. Dogging the footsteps of James Bond and dozens of wannabe Bonds, Monarch tangles with Vietnamese security forces during his inspection of Niamey, follows a clue to the Apocalypse Now Bar, arouses the ire of Shing-Tun triad leader Long Chan-Juan, the sinister Moon Dragon who pulls the strings from Hong Kong, and generally raises hell wherever he goes. Bashir Rhana, Monarch’s counterpart from India, soon departs the action, leaving Song Le, of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, as the Bond girl. As she and Monarch question fences, mercenaries and arms dealers who lie, squirm, then try to kill them, the Sons of Prophecy step up their game, sabotaging the Suez and Panama canals, and the clock ticks down toward the moment when the secretary of state and her fellow diplomats will face the scimitar. An extended epilogue sorts out exactly who was responsible for which double cross for the benefit of those who care.
As in Monarch’s debut (Rogue, 2012), veteran Sullivan throws every popcorn-movie cliché you can think of into the mix. The result is the most soothingly predictable geopolitical thriller imaginable.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02361-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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