This well-written yarn proves that you don't have to have a blood bath to have an engaging thriller.
A complex thriller written by a four-time Academy Award–nominated screenwriter.
The American government secretly partners with a firm called Fusion to find ways to identify and locate potential terrorists on American soil. Fusion claims its software can find anyone, anytime, anywhere. Because we aren't China, muses an executive, America's “technology such as this will be deployed only as the need arises.” (Oh, sure.) To conduct a beta test, they randomly select 10 applicants from the public who, at a given signal, must try to suddenly disappear and become untraceable. That turns out to be a near impossibility in the 21st century, what with credit cards, cameras, cellphones, and the internet. But the incentive is $3 million, and there is no penalty for being caught beyond hearing that it's time to go home. Everyone thinks they are clever about disappearing, but half of them go home quickly anyway. The focus turns to “Zero 10,” aka Kaitlyn Day, a quiet “Boston spinster” and “super-intelligent nutcase” librarian. While she's on the run, she thinks about her friend Warren, who had already disappeared and is maybe being held captive in the Middle East somewhere. She is exceptionally resourceful, as when she falls into a well deep in the woods and seems to have no way out. This is a curious type of thriller, with sparse violence and no outright villains. The excitement is in the chase, which builds steadily. Is Zero 10 going to screw up their proof-of-concept software? The complications build, and the reader had better pay attention. Eventually, the government is looking for Kaitlyn's friend Samantha Crewe instead, and both women have an emotional attachment to the missing Warren, who is Samantha’s husband. Meanwhile, is there a real cyberattack to deal with, perhaps the biggest data breach in history? The find-anyone-anywhere premise of the story will become increasingly relevant as the 21st century progresses. Good luck to American society.
This well-written yarn proves that you don't have to have a blood bath to have an engaging thriller.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780063227071
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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