There’s “no rest for Team Texarkana” in this entertaining diversion.
The United States faces destruction unless an undercover CIA agent and Team Texarkana can foil an intricately conceived conspiracy in Davis’ thriller.
The diabolical plans James Bond villains concoct to rule the world are kid stuff compared to the Great Reset, a far-reaching, decades-in-the-making plot to “take down the United States.” Who is involved? Perhaps the question should be, “who is not involved?” Spearheaded by German multi-billionaire Klaus Burger, the Great Reset is a partnership between “some disillusioned Russians and Chinese officials in prominent positions in governments and private enterprises,” in addition to “a secret underground group of carefully selected green-energy zealots” and “one of Washington, DC’s most influential and known political leaders who was at the cusp of taking power.” The Chinese discovery of cobalt in a meteorite crater has game-changing implications for energy efficiency and battery performance. This development, coupled with a covert Chinese scheme to buy “immense swaths of farmland in the US, Canada, and other countries that permitted the selling of land to foreign companies,” promises to give them control of food and energy production in those countries. “No country, not even the Americans or their allies, will be able to stop us,” Burger proclaims. Enter Team Texarkana, introduced in Davis’ Flames of Deception (2022). Tex and his elite, first-names-only team of four is black ops–funded and can be placed anywhere in the world within 18 hours. The team is dispatched into action when Mary Johnson, a deep undercover CIA agent (by way of the Culinary Institute of America; “CIA squared”) disappears, along with her sister, Janet, who has fallen into Burger’s unspeakable clutches. As in the previous installment, this sophomore outing gets much of its energy from drawing on ripped-from-the-headlines situations. The fantastical conspiracy is “out there” to the extreme and the writing is not subtle (Burger also operates a sex-trafficking ring), but the briskly paced action covers the globe from Washington, D.C., to North Korea to the Gobi Desert and Mongolia, providing the requisite escapism.
There’s “no rest for Team Texarkana” in this entertaining diversion.Pub Date: May 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781959677314
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Defiance Press & Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
