A remarkable tale that makes espionage rousing, demanding, and occasionally terrifying.
An intelligence operative becomes the unwitting pawn of an American agency seeking vital information on a potential terrorist in this debut thriller.
The Executive Covert Agency is focused on Mihai Cuza, a dangerous man planning to discredit the Romanian government. As this likely entails terrorist activity, the ECA has an agent close to Cuza. The spy manages to send the agency a list of 15 towns around the world, each home to a nuclear power plant. Cuza is surely plotting something nefarious, but ECA agent Nikolai Ivanovich “Kolya” Petrov discovers a more immediate concern. As Cuza has unmasked several agents, there must be a leak, which Kolya narrows down to one of three people on the Intelligence Committee. ECA head Margaret Bradford wants to identify the mole but also has another scheme in the works: tricking Cuza into downloading a Trojan horse on his seemingly unhackable computer. She sends an oblivious Kolya on a standard mission, hoping that Cuza will kidnap the agent and coerce him into accessing ECA’s site (where a Trojan horse awaits). As Kolya will likely resist torture, Bradford ensures the mole somehow learns about the agent’s lawyer girlfriend, Alex Feinstein, whom Cuza subsequently abducts to use as leverage. Jonathan Egan, Kolya’s friend and frequent ECA partner, teams up with others to find his fellow agent despite an early report that Kolya has died. As Jonathan and Kolya gradually realize that Bradford has deliberately arranged the abductions, they contemplate revenge—although making sure Kolya and Alex survive their predicaments comes first.
The bulk of Manning’s espionage tale, which shifts between various perspectives, centers on individuals searching for Kolya or keeping him captive. As such, the action is minimal but striking: Kolya does not make an easy target for kidnappers, and Alex proves more than capable when it appears escape is viable. Readers will sympathize with Kolya, especially since Bradford puts him in harm’s way even after acknowledging he’s one of ECA’s best agents. Moreover, the Russian Jewish immigrant is a skilled jazz pianist who distracts himself from his harrowing experience by playing musical pieces in his head. The torture Kolya endures is unsurprisingly violent but never excessive or exceedingly graphic. Still, Cuza’s preferred method of homicide is particularly cruel and brutal. Manning thankfully describes it only once, and subsequent mentions of the act are enough to rack up the tension, as it may befall the protagonist. The story’s spies and villains are appropriately complex and unpredictable. Bradford, for example, isn’t the only one at ECA who betrays Kolya, and some aligned with Cuza don’t necessarily agree with his plan to torture the agent into submission. Some readers may question certain plot points, including that it seems every character is aware of ECA, “an agency that few knew existed,” as well as flawed technological jargon (for example, software downloaded to a computer rather than uploaded). But these are relatively minor stumbles in an otherwise bracing narrative. Though this could easily be a stand-alone novel, the engaging volume is the start of a series.
A remarkable tale that makes espionage rousing, demanding, and occasionally terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64599-102-1
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Encircle Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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