A sharp spy story that deftly mixes fiction with history and also offers a rewarding denouement for Eastland’s near-mythic...
At the apex of World War II, Moscow’s most notorious detective gets one last assignment from his master, Joseph Stalin.
Eastland (Red Icon, 2015, etc.) is the nom de plume of literary novelist Paul Watkins (Midget Submarine Commander, 2013, etc.), who offers here the seventh story about Inspector Pekkala, the unflappable Finnish police detective who began his career as Czar Nicholas II’s personal investigator and went on to work for the Communists. This entry begins in April 1945, just as the Battle of Berlin is about to begin. Via the British intelligence services, Stalin learns that one of their operatives, code-named Christophe, has gotten access to a secret of vital importance to all the players about to divide up Germany. More important, the spy turns out to be Lilya Simonova, Pekkala’s lost love, whom he hasn’t laid eyes on since 1917. Stalin dispatches Pekkala and his Watson-like comrade, Kirov, to the heart of Nazi Germany to retrieve her but with Kirov under orders to execute Pekkala if he doesn’t want to return. Eastland’s old-school spycraft is as sharp as ever, and as in his nuanced depiction of the deadly Stalin in earlier books, here he takes us deep inside the Führerbunker in Berlin, where the paranoid narcissist Hitler faces his final days. It transpires that Lilya has become the confidante of real-life SS officer Hermann Fegelein, brother-in-law to Eva Braun and liaison to Himmler. Meanwhile, we learn that the general in charge of Hitler’s V2 rocket program has developed a vastly improved new guidance system that could turn the tide on the war. It’s essentially the novel’s MacGuffin, but it gives the proceedings a sense of urgency, not to mention giving Eastland’s fictional Hitler an even more foreboding sense of evil. This final entry in a superb historical series not only stands well on its own, but also gives its iconic hero a satisfying finale.
A sharp spy story that deftly mixes fiction with history and also offers a rewarding denouement for Eastland’s near-mythic detective.Pub Date: June 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62316-090-6
Page Count: 380
Publisher: OPUS
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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