Perhaps more cerebral and less breathtaking then Spycatcher but as rewarding as championship bridge.
A single piece of paper that could trigger massive fatalities disappears in this cryptic thriller.
Ex-MI6 field officer Dunn turns to a plot centering on a doomsday scenario. At an abandoned Soviet military barracks in Berlin in 1995, two Russians and two Americans gather to sign a document for an operation called Slingshot. Slingshot could cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and so secret are its plans that the signatories are told they will be killed if they leak details. With the mystery of the plan’s contents hovering, proceedings shift to the present and to Gdansk, Poland, where Will Cochrane, the eponymous protagonist of Spycatcher (2011) and Sentinel (2012), waits at night by the Vistula River to connect with a defector from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service. Allegedly, the defector carries “a single piece of paper” that is “lethal.” But no sooner does the defector leap from an arriving Russian ship—in a swift and sharply written chase scene—than he is apparently kidnapped by a group of men in a van, who, it turns out, may be a privately funded group. Cut to Langley, where Flintlock, a CIA group so exclusive even the CIA at large knows not of its existence, assembles a group to retrieve the Russian agent and the vital paper. Eventually, all turn to Cochrane to spearhead the hunt. As usual, the opaque Cochrane remains a swift and deadly killing machine and an aficionado of Assam tea (brewed from leaves). But this time, he enters into—and sometimes becomes lost in—an infinitely more complex game, one played by many hands from several sides and involving enough characters (few entirely trustworthy, of course) to populate a minor Russian novel. Tricky and circuitous as the plotting becomes, it ultimately converges on a moving, personal story.
Perhaps more cerebral and less breathtaking then Spycatcher but as rewarding as championship bridge.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-203802-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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