A pleasant romp all the same; as lightweight as a whiffleball—but fun.
Zingy formula—emphasis on formula—fiction from the literary maquiladora that is James Patterson.
All right, it’s not literature. But Patterson, he of six dozen novels and counting, has an uncanny knack for the timely thriller, and this one is no exception. The Private of the title is a security firm (think Blackwater, though better at hiding its secrets) charged with providing said security during the London Olympic Games. As the book opens in July 2012, a Very Bad Man is about to disrupt the games in ways that the Palestinians at Munich could never imagine, with the secondary aim, it would seem, of watching the cream of British pop music run for the exits: “To keep the infernal singing from getting to me, I focus on the fact that just a few minutes from now, I will reveal myself. And when I do I’ll be able to rejoice in their shared horror—McCartney, John, and Faithfull, too.” Now, Sir Paul and Sir Elton, sure, but what’s Marianne Faithfull ever done, apart from smoke too many cigarettes, to offend this puritan? It’s tipoff enough that he goes by the name of Cronus, the Greek Ur-god that killed and ate his own children. So, Hannibal Lecter, no? Not quite—and nowhere near Thomas Harris’ league, insofar as the writing is concerned. Private eye Peter Knight, whose name is as suggestive as Philip Marlowe’s, goes into action, working with the ever-irritating reporter Karen Pope to take down the voracious Mr. Bad, who shares narrator duties with the authors, and who seems to take a rather wide view of which children he’s entitled to eat. Will the world ever be safe from our literal spoilsport? Read this and see. Be offended if you’re a fan of Renée Zellweger or dislike offhand sexism. Be more offended if you’re a fan of English writ well.
A pleasant romp all the same; as lightweight as a whiffleball—but fun.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-20682-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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