Making her spy fiction debut, Plame, with the seasoned Lovett's help, delivers a solid, entertaining thriller.
Having told her real-life story in the memoir Fair Game (2007), former CIA agent Plame teams with Lovett, author of the Dr. Sylvia Strange series, to relate the adventures of undercover CIA operative Vanessa Pierson.
Pierson is obsessed with tracking down the world's most dangerous terrorist, Bhoot, who is said to be stockpiling weapons of mass destruction in Iran. His location is secret, but his closest associate, a grim sniper assassin named Pauk, is roaming around, knocking off people who threaten to expose closely held secrets. Those targets include Vanessa's informers, the first of whom gets shot in the head in Prague in a meeting she was told to abort. Readers who have watched TV's Covert Affairs, featuring slightly perkier undercover agent Annie Walker, will pretty much know what to expect here. In her intense pursuit of justice, which takes her to numerous scenic locations, Vanessa goes against her superiors' orders and violates basic rules—including the one that you don't get romantically involved with a connection in the field. That leads her to a predictable dilemma in which she has to decide whether or not to trust her lover. However unoriginal it is, the book moves along briskly and intelligently, informed by the disillusionment Plame suffered in having her cover blown by the Bush administration. There are plenty of action scenes for Vanessa to fling herself into and, in this first installment in the series, a decently drawn, if not yet scare-inducing, villain.
Making her spy fiction debut, Plame, with the seasoned Lovett's help, delivers a solid, entertaining thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15820-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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