A short but kinetic tale featuring a consistently entertaining hero.
A clergyman of action tries to capture a former U.S. government agent on the run in this latest installment of a thriller series.
Long Island, New York–based pastor Stephen Grant heads to the French Alps for a nearly three-week retreat at a monastery. The trip, whose highlight is sampling the monks’ much-praised French chocolate, takes an unexpected turn when Grant unexpectedly sees the fugitive Hunter Bryant among the monastery’s visitors. This disgraced former CIA agent shook America when he stole sensitive files and gave them to Garth Bellanger, who’s known for posting secret information publicly. In this case, it’s a list of CIA assets around the world whose exposure has resulted in numerous deaths. Grant, who’s also a former CIA operative as well as an ex–Navy SEAL, hopes to bring Bryant to justice and ultimately seeks help from friends at CDM International Strategies and Security. Sean McEnany, the “M” in CDM, is particularly eager to find Bryant, as one of the list’s casualties was a former colleague of his. Unfortunately, Bryant manages to get out a distress signal, causing Bellanger to send mercenary bodyguards to France. With any luck, Grant can hold off the mercenaries until CDM comes to his aid. Keating, the author of Deep Rough (2019), delivers a relatively brief adventure, but as in the author’s earlier books, it’s a swiftly paced one. Several characters return from previous installments, but the story wisely zeroes in on Grant, McEnany, and Bryant. Exciting, tightly written action scenes comprise the final act, but there’s humor sprinkled throughout the narrative, as well. For example, characters repeatedly praise the French chocolate and request that Grant bring some back to America; apparently, the monks won’t ship it overseas. Keating’s series is often grim, but this installment seems a bit darker than others, featuring a particularly violent death and a surprisingly bleak moment involving a series regular.
A short but kinetic tale featuring a consistently entertaining hero.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70920-977-2
Page Count: 159
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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