Fast-moving and exciting, this one reads like it came from Clancy himself.
Clancy’s thriller industry lives on in this Jack Ryan Jr. adventure by Maden.
Vladimir Vasilev heads the Iron Syndicate, an international criminal enterprise, and he’s dying of cancer. Even bad guys have bucket lists, and his fondest wish is to have Jack Jr.’s head cut off and delivered to him. When Jack, a financial analyst, travels to the Balkans on business, his eye-surgeon mother, Cathy, asks him to look up a former patient, Aida Curic, in Sarajevo. Then the hit woman Elena Iliescu tries first to charm and then kill Jack. She goes one-for-one. “I’m just a guy who can throw a punch,” he says later. People wonder why anyone wants to kill him, while others muse that there's “no way to keep Jack safe short of locking him up.” He eventually finds the gorgeous (of course) Aida, a secular Muslim who runs a tour business and a refugee aid organization. They hit it off well enough that Jack almost falls in love. Oddly, no one in the story ever seems to associate Junior with Senior, who occupies the White House. Jack says his name is common in America, but some character might at least comment that he shares a famous name with or that he looks rather like the American president. Anyway, the stakes are high, with the Iron Syndicate hoping to incite World War 3 because “mafias thrive in wartime.” So they plan to vaporize thousands of people in a stadium using “122-millimeter thermobaric missiles fixed on the new T-14 Armata chassis.” In the Adriatic Sea, the USS Garza has GM/UGM-109E (TLAM-Block IV) Tomahawk cruise missiles, but they may be too late. There’s plenty of action, but readers looking for gore will have to settle for Bulgarian body parts in a kimchi jar and a poor fellow “shredded…like creamed chipped beef.”
Fast-moving and exciting, this one reads like it came from Clancy himself.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1592-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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