An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.
Ex–Navy SEAL Brett Garrett and ex–FBI agent Valerie Mayberry, each disgraced in their respective field, go outside of official channels to avert a devastating threat to the United States.
The murder of an Iranian scientist who lived in a condo down the hall from Garrett primes the plot of this geopolitical thriller, which involves a criminally connected Russian oil billionaire; an evil Iranian general who was "conceived in a brutal rape"; a Palestinian father-daughter assassination team out to avenge the killing of the rest of their family in an Israeli bombing; and an Islamic terrorist recruited by Iran to detonate a nuclear device on a "ghost" submarine off the coast of Virginia. Back from Gingrich and Earley's Collusion (2019), Brett and Valerie are quite the duo. He is an opioid-addicted Afghanistan and black ops veteran whose torture/murder of Russian general Andre Gromyko (Gingrich's backhanded salute to the late, real-life Soviet foreign minister?) led to his ouster from the SEALs. She is an obsessive, oxycodone-popping beauty (her partner thinks she resembles Keri Russell of TV's The Americans, but she acts more like Claire Danes on Homeland) who has to cope with permanent nerve damage from a gas attack on the U.S. Senate. Though the authors are happy to install a naïve president with the name Randle Fitzgerald, their political commentary is largely restrained—Fitzgerald's party affiliation is not revealed. This is, at its best, an action thriller, with a full share of bang-up scenes (and at least one torture too many). And though former House Speaker Gingrich and Earley have a nagging tendency to have characters verbalize plot details (as in "Remind me, Petrov, how many fights did you win before we were released?" and "You mean, before your father bribed three judges to erase our crimes?"), they keep the story afloat.
An entertaining, if coldhearted, international thriller.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-286019-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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