Cook masterfully captures the tumultuous state of a country in upheaval; it’s a shame the story doesn’t match the richness...
A man wrestles with demons from his past in Cook’s introspective if at times overly drawn-out novel.
Ray Campbell lives comfortably in Manhattan as a risk management consultant, advising others when and if to take a chance on everything from stocks to property deals. Cook (Sandrine’s Case, 2013, etc.) excels at merging contemporary and past storylines into one narrative, and it’s no different here: Ray is haunted by his time spent in the fictional African country of Lubanda 20 years earlier. With all the good intentions of the best, if most naïve, aid worker, Ray spent a year in Lubanda, a country rife with violent internal conflicts, as part of the NGO Hope for Lubanda. There, he met the only woman he ever loved, Martine Aubert. Of French and Belgian descent, Martine was born in Lubanda and considered herself a native of the country, an assertion that increasingly chafed the government, who considered all whites a foreign menace to be eradicated. It’s clear early on that Martine will meet an untimely, and likely grisly, end during what’s referred to as the Tumasi Road Incident, but Cook dances around the facts for a few beats too long, and the suspense deflates. Spurred on by the murder of an old friend from his Lubanda days, Seso Alaya, who traveled to New York with a mysterious message that likely got him killed, Ray returns to Lubanda, both to avenge Seso’s death and try to assuage his own guilt about Martine's fate.
Cook masterfully captures the tumultuous state of a country in upheaval; it’s a shame the story doesn’t match the richness of the setting.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2272-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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