Lawson takes a big step up from House Secrets (2009) with a devilishly intricate, whirlwind tale, wittily told, that...
Seminar-level thriller uses the Valerie Plame case as the premise for a dizzying pursuit of an informant.
Soon after gunmen murder Mahata Javadi, a CIA spy attempting to flee Iran, New York Daily News reporter Sandra Whitmore faces a judge in Manhattan at 2 a.m. His honor demands she reveal the source of a story that led to the spy’s murder. Jailed when she refuses, the resourceful reporter blackmails Speaker of the House John Fitzpatrick Mahoney, who is married: Get me out of here, she demands, or I’ll go public about our sordid affair. Mahoney summons fixer Joe DeMarco to figure out how to satisfy judge and reporter. DeMarco succeeds, then learns that the source Whitmore ID’d used a fake name and may be CIA. Besides DeMarco and Mahoney, many others want to know who the real informant was, and several people want him dead. One is Marty Taylor, who faces the collapse of his computer-game empire since the source revealed Marty’s company was selling Tehran equipment to help their missiles strike Israel. Hired gunman Benny Mark goes after the source, for some reason, as does a man known only as the florist, who shadows DeMarco’s every move. Enough characters and back stories for a minor Russian novel set in a maze follow, well into the book’s final third. Then the patient, meticulous reader is rewarded with swift action scenes—a three-way shoot-out in which the shooters aren’t always sure of who’s shooting at them, and Taylor’s nifty escape from thugs driving a car loaded with shovels to dig his grave. As the showdown zeroes in on the main players, a strong point lands when DeMarco’s girlfriend observes that the scores of ploys and maneuvers they’ve outwitted—sometimes by luck and timing—is the real, unseen stuff of the war on terror.
Lawson takes a big step up from House Secrets (2009) with a devilishly intricate, whirlwind tale, wittily told, that delivers a sobering message.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1937-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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