Engaging action and appealing characters propel this rousing novel.
A retired spy reunites with his team to combat vengeful killers in Howard’s short thriller-series starter.
Middle-aged former CIA case officer Jack Trench, now living in Monterey, California, is shocked when he hears that an old colleague in Atlanta has been gunned down. Footage of the crime is even more startling, as the shooter employs a signature technique of the Communist New People’s Army. In the Philippines in 1990, Trench’s specialized unit, known as the Watchers, had dealings with the NPA—a vicious organization known for its assassinations of government officials. Trench connects the Atlanta shooting with a recent homicide in the Philippines and comes to believe that his old team members are now targets. Indeed, it turns out that someone—who blames Philippine authorities and the CIA for his father’s incarceration—has been training to get bloody revenge against his enemies. It doesn’t take long for Trench to work out who’s after the Watchers, and he convinces his ex-boss Patricia Helliwell to reactivate his team so that they can seek their own brand of retribution. Howard, who used to work for the CIA and is the author of such nonfiction books as The Art of Executing Rōnin Leadership Strategies (2022), delivers a taut, action-oriented story in this thriller, which has a striking and likable cast. The Watchers are an appealingly diverse team with a range of useful skills; Trench is a former U.S. Marine, for example, and nerdy Quigley Street has a doctorate in criminal psychology. Moreover, the story lays out a solid foundation for its later action with a lengthy opening that unfolds in 1990 Manila before hopping to the present day. Howard’s unadorned prose complements this streamlined narrative. Genre fans may find a lack of surprises overall. However, the action scenes, including gunfights (“The shotgun boomed and a 12 gauge round shattered the big screen television in the room”) and fisticuffs, really pop. The story builds to an exciting, albeit rushed, final act and aptly sets the stage for a second installment.
Engaging action and appealing characters propel this rousing novel.Pub Date: March 17, 2023
ISBN: 9798987621707
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Bowker
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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