A captivating financial thriller that works despite some daunting jargon.
A retired computer genius is called into action when the world financial markets are at risk in Mattison’s thriller.
In the year 2027, a year after his abrupt departure from the ICARUS project, Rory O’Connor is living off the grid in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He’s lost his best friend, Peter Costello, in a violent robbery in Chicago, and left his job and the city—his days in international finance and intrigue are behind him. Or so he thinks. As ICARUS, the game-changing quantum AI platform that operates the world’s financial markets (“Co-located servers, fiber networks, and complex algorithms had created a stock market run more by machines than by men or women”), launches its final phase, some unusual activity online lures Rory back into action. A sometimes-convoluted narrative finds Rory working with Peter’s sister, Mia, along with Rory and Peter’s former boss, Milton McGrady, the CEO of a company called Celtic Capital, to beat bad guys from China, Russia, and India to the contents of an encrypted thumb drive left by Peter. The stakes include dire consequences not only for the individuals involved but for the world financial order as well. Rory and Mia fight the good fight around the world, mostly in Switzerland and Chicago. Along the way, of course, they fall for each other, increasing the tension when they both get into life-threatening situations at the Basel headquarters of ICARUS, a complex containing a mainframe called Quoz. Despite its challenging-to-parse subject matter—including AI, the financial world, politics of world powers, crypto-currency, and the blockchain—the novel is an exciting read. The author has created a likeable and relatable hero in Rory, and Mia is a worthy sidekick. Together, they offset the book’s financial and political mumbo-jumbo with big doses of humor and some exciting action sequences. Readers’ enjoyment won’t be stymied much by the lack of an MBA or intimate knowledge of finance; Mattison explains enough for readers to keep up and knows how to spin an exciting yarn.
A captivating financial thriller that works despite some daunting jargon.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798888452028
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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