An exceptional storyteller in fine form.
A London-based writer finds himself stuck in the webs of British intelligence.
It’s 1960 and Gabriel Dax is flying home to England after interviewing Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba when a series of “strange coincidences” begins. He’s upgraded to first class and a woman on the plane is reading one of his travel books. Back home he finds someone has left his flat in “careful disarray,” and the plane woman appears in his neighborhood. She soon reappears, says she’s from MI6, and asks him to “do us a small service.” The job goes smoothly except for the woman who plants heroin on Gabriel, which he discovers before the police do, and the CIA man who’s interested in the tape recording of the Lumumba interview because it reveals a direct link between the prime minister’s subsequent assassination and former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Boyd sets his story not long after news of Guy Burgess and the other Cambridge Five double agents began to emerge. Dealing with such moles becomes a larger theme of the book and provides a nasty twist at the end. In this murky world, Gabriel is a kind of Evelyn Waugh naif caught in a Graham Greene plot, and one of the book’s pleasures is his entirely plausible resourcefulness as challenges grow more perilous. While Boyd craftily ramps up the complications for his reluctant spy, he also gives him a full life apart from intelligence errands. He has embarked on a new travel book, about major rivers. He’s enjoying great sex with a woman who doesn’t seem to demand much more. And he has begun therapy sessions for insomnia and dreams that recall when he was 6 and his house burned down, leaving his mother dead while he barely escaped. Boyd doesn’t quite weave all these strands into a neat little package, but it’s still a highly entertaining book that can easily bear a few loose ends.
An exceptional storyteller in fine form.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780802164872
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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