Dual heroes scour for valuables and tangle with spies in this often enthralling outing.
A treasure hunter and a writer reunite in this sequel as the duo’s search for a fortune in Fabergé eggs pits them against the KGB.
Six years ago, Bobby McAllister and Granger Lawton put their heads together to discover a long-lost treasure. Now international treasure hunter McAllister returns to the U.S. to rope Lawton into another adventure. The valuables this time? Fabergé eggs. McAllister currently owns six, and the Russians want all of them. That’s because the KGB has been buying or stealing Russian antiquities and selling forgeries to private collectors. KGB agents even assaulted and robbed McAllister’s brother-in-law after he won a Fabergé egg in an auction. In a global trek that spans such places as London and Switzerland, McAllister and Lawton learn what they can from a forger while evading various threats. By the time they reach St. Petersburg, there’s another fortune to seek—a “Fabergé treasure” that a thief allegedly stole in the early 20th century. Russian spies, however, are everywhere, and the friends lose loved ones, suffer betrayals, and face the business ends of numerous guns. Ferguson’s second installment of a trilogy takes a notable turn, favoring espionage over treasure hunting. Still, backstories covering both world wars prove a worthy foundation, whether it involves KGB agents or the Fabergé fortune. At the same time, the recurring protagonists share a delightfully complicated relationship; just because they respect and admire each other doesn’t mean they don’t verbally spar. Sadly, McAllister’s motivation (and the narrative drive) is sometimes tepid; he’s essentially bored with his billionaire life. Lawton, the more intriguing of the two in this installment, has a much more dramatic pull because he bases certain decisions on his desire for revenge. Like the preceding book, the novel maintains a steady pace with plenty of action and ever changing locales.
Dual heroes scour for valuables and tangle with spies in this often enthralling outing.Pub Date: Dec. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-77097-898-0
Page Count: 424
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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