Category Archives: Thrillers

Review: Sirocco – St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking #2 (Dana Haynes)

Sirocco is the second book in the St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking Series, and I have to say, it’s great fun.

The duo behind St. Nicholas Salvage & Wrecking – a sham company – an ex-cop named Finnegan and an ex-spy assassin named Fiero, work out of Cyprus as international bounty hunters. One day, the Paris Station Chief for the CIA, Annie Pryor, and Hugo Llorente, from the Spanish Central Intelligence (who also trained Fiero to be a killer) come to the office in Cyprus to hire them to track down the leadership of a jihadist group that has taken responsibility for bombings in various countries. The group follows up each bombing by releasing a video, with the usual death to the infidels sort of thing.Pryor and Llorente have dark money slush funds, so they’re paying an unspecified (tot he reader) but probably obscene amount of money, and promising that the two will have whatever support the can clandestinely give – a sort of blank check for a rollicking story that rolls through Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and France.

As Finnegan and Fiero dig around in the history of the bombings, a security company (think Blackwater) ALSO want to find the jihadis – and they want to get Finnegan and Fiero away from the trail because those two want to bring in the leader of the group for trial, but the security firm intends to kill him.

But as we learn through Finnegan and Fiero’s investigation, not everything is as it seems, and the truth of the reason for the bombings eventually reveals itself. A truth that brings danger right to their doorstep. To go deeper into it would be much too spoilery – and would take the fun out of reading it.

This is a fun, fast read. Some of the things that are done are not particularly believable, but beyond a couple of instances, the action was plausible, and the banter between Finnegan and Fiero was, at times, quite witty.

A solid four out of five stars.

Review: Solstice Shadows – VanOps #2 (Avanti Centrae)

Solstice Shadows is the second book in the VanOps series. As per usual, I have not read the first, but from the description, it apparently could be read as a standalone. I really, really wish the publisher had not implied this, because it is not so. It’s clear that the story of what came before is important, and treating this like a second book where the first needs to be read, instead of a standalone part of the series, does a disservice to the book and thus to the reader.

The issue is that the author does not weave the backstory into this book well. We get internal monologues out the wazoo, and a bunch of “As you know,” with some flat out telling mixed in for good measure. Were the backstory presented as necessary, in short bursts, instead of the author trying to get in a large chunk of it at once, it would have been less annoying.

At its most basic: a star chart that supposedly maps to a source of superconductive material has been stolen from the apartment of Maddy Marshall (if it’s so important, why does she not keep it in a safe?) but the thief did not find the sliver of a blade? material? something. She, her twin brother, and her boyfriend Bear have been recruited to the super super super secret VanOps group – interestingly, even with all the telling going on, I’ve no idea at 35% what the “van” part of that stands for – and Maddy is dithering on accepting because she’s part of a super super super secret and special group of international spies. Or something.

I’m sorry, but the narrative in this is driving me crazy as I read it and it’s going on the DNF list at 35%. I didn’t care about these people, what they’d done, or what they were going to do, and I just don’t think the writing itself is very good. This one was not for me, even though it sounded interesting when I came across it.

Thanks to Thunder Creek and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: Out of Her Mind – Sawyer Brooks #2 (T. R. Ragan)

This is the second book to feature Sawyer Brooks, following Don’t Make a Sound, which I have not read. While I found this did not completely torpedo my ability to follow this second book without having read the first, I think it would have been quite helpful to have read that first book, especially to understand Sawyer’s personal issues and the Black Wig ladies. It was a bit confusing to suddenly jump into the head of one of the latter group.

Here, we have Sawyer looking into the disappearance of a young girl after her music lesson at the home of her piano teacher. While the authorities are treating it as a generic disappearance, Sawyer digs around and finds connections to other disappearances. When the bones of a small child are unearthed, the stake get even higher, and it’s then a race against time for Sawyer to find the missing girl, with the help of her editor and sister.

I filed this under thriller instead of mystery, because there is no mystery here: we know who took the girl, because the perpetrator gets their own turn in the spotlight, with several chapters from their viewpoint. The only mystery involved here is whether Sawyer and crew will find the girl before she, too, winds up in a shallow grave.

When the narrative suddenly broke into the viewpoint of one of the Black Wigs women, it was a little jarring and a tad confusing. Again, this may be due to me not having read the first book. We also get several scenes of what those women are doing to men who have harmed them. It wasn’t until the third time that I realized one of the women was Sawyer’s other sister (not the one helping her find the missing girl).

The story was enjoyable enough – there isn’t anything hidden from the reader, so what Sawyer knows, we know, and that’s a plus for me, as I don’t like withheld evidence that prevents readers from connecting the dots to find the ad guy (or in this case, potentially find the missing girl).

I gave this 3.5 stars out of five, and rounded it up to 4, as there were no glaring plot holes. Although there were some scenes that didn’t quite ring true, those involved the Black Wig crew and not the main character.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: The Good Killer (Harry Dolan)

I liked the idea – a couple, creating new lives under new names to escape a past we don’t immediately know about. The execution of it, though, left me feeling a bit meh.

Sean and Molly are living in Houston under new names, years after ripping off an art dealer in a heist in which Sean’s friend Cole, was killed. The art dealer wants revenge and the stolen materials back, and the dead man’s father (who seems to be some kind of low level gangster) just wants revenge.

One day, when Sean is at a mall – which the author tells us is the largest in Texas, or something or other – when an obsessed man grabs a woman from the store in which she works and starts shooting other shoppers. Sean walks up to him and calmly executes him with one shot each to the chest and head. After helping a couple of the injured people, he leaves. Security footage, though, gets out into the world, and now the people who want their pound of flesh know where he is.

While they make their way to Houston, Sean bugs out, heading to Montana to pick up Molly, who has gone there on a retreat. Along the way, we get some Legend of Billy Jean type narrative, with an auto repair shop owner and a local Sheriff recognizing Sean from the mall video, but not doing anything about him and allowing him to go on his way.

Jimmy,the dead man’s father, and his sidekick make it to Montana before Sean, and try to kidnap Molly in order to force Sean’s hand. But they miss, and Molly hops into Sean’s car, as he has arrived just in the nick of time. Afterward, Jimmy tells his sidekick all about what happened to Cole, so the readers….I mean, so his sidekick will know why he wants to find and kill Sean.

It goes on like this for awhile, but not before we collect a lot of other characters along the way. Events converge on a single location and there is the requisite people dying at the end and another transformation.

The narrative was not particularly compelling and was also supremely annoying. First, it seems everyone and their brother got some narrative time, sometimes in the middle of someone else’s narrative (something that was done for no good reason I could see; the second character’s piece could just as easily been said after the one it broke into). Second, the writing style was full of short, declarative sentences. Lots of them. In both dialogue and narrative. Sentence fragments, too. Many of them. Third, we got a lot of step by steps of what the characters were doing. Like this:

“His hiking boots are in the trunk. He puts them on and locks the car. He sets out for one of the hiking trails, but after only a few paces he turns back.

There’s a Glock nine millimeter in the glove compartment with a shoulder rig to hold it. He sits in the passenger seat and straps it on. He reaches into the backseat for his gray windbreaker. He puts it on to cover the gun.”

This sort of thing is all over the place.

Finally, it’s in present tense, of which I’m not really a fan.

It’s serviceable, and a fast enough read. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it, either.

Three stars out of five.

Thanks to Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: Time to Hunt – Pierce Hunt #3 (Simon Gervais)

Time to Hunt is the third book in a series, and I have not read the first two. While there may be information about Pierce Hunt in the first two, I’m afraid I’ll never know.

This book opens with what is to me a laughable action: an operative in Turkey, awakening suddenly in a bed, “diving” for a pistol that is under the other pillow on the bed. A team of black-clothed commandos bursts in and takes him away. He’s tortured a few chapters later and at the end of that, it seems he is dying/has died.

Meanwhile, a CIA officer named Triggs is with her son, tracking down Pierce Hunt in the Bahamas. She was told not to go to Turkey to hunt down Jorge Ramirez (who apparently is someone they’ve been hunting in the first two books), so in the spirit of renegade officers everywhere, she sends someone else.thus, the dude bed diving. Her son Max is her second in command, and they talk about sending the badass Hunt to Turkey with another operative to get the bed diving guy back.

Their vehicles are attacked, and Max sends his mother down the hill behind them after she’s been shot. As she makes a break for it, their vehicle is hit with an RPG and explodes, and her son with it, apparently.

I’ll stop there for spoiler reasons, in the event you want to read this.

This is one of those very rare instances that a book is a DNF for me. At 15% (according to the progress meter on my Fire), we find out who the bad guy is. At 18%, he has a very lengthy internal monologue, letting us know all about his motivation and his plans.

How can you write a thriller when one of the pieces that should be thrilling but that is not present here is the hunt for the bad guy, sniffing them out, flushing them from cover out into the open so the denouement is satisfying? I know the ultimate bad guy is Ramirez, but short of capturing/killing him, someone else has to take his place in each book, and if I’m told who it is and why he’s doing things, it really blunts the part of my mind that cares about what happens, since it’s likely that person will be caught/killed.

Sadly, I cannot recommend this. As always, your mileage may vary.

Two stars out of five.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: Payback (Lorenzo Carcaterra)

Payback begins with Detective Eddie Kenwood coercing a murder confession out of a young black man.

We then cut to Tommy “Tank” Rizzo watching his nephew Chris shoot hoops, and a tiny infodump about how Tank and his partner Frank “Pearl” Monroe were shot off the job and how Chris came to live with Tank – more specifically, how Tank’s brother and sister in law (Chris’ parents) were killed in an auto accident.

This is about the extent of how character development goes throughout the book. As this is book two in the series, perhaps we get to know the characters better in book one. Alas, I’ve not read it.

Tank and Pearl, ex-cops that they are, get thrown cases by the Chief of Detectives from time to time when the official NYPD detectives are overloaded. In this book, however, the focus is on determining if Tank’s brother – as his nephew insists – was murdered in that car accident, versus it being a real accident, and to find out is the company is laundering money for bad guys locally and from around the world. The secondary focus is on Tank and Pearl collecting evidence about Eddie Kenwood and more specifically, getting the young man who confessed at the beginning of the book out of prison.

Tank and Pearl run an investigative service, but there isn’t a ton of investigating of the main case done on the page – probably because it’s accounting, and pulling up spreadsheets and putting numbers all over the page would slow things down, as it’s difficult to put tension into that.

The better parts of the book are when Tank and Pearl actually go back into the field to get informants and cons to talk about Kenwood so they can build a case. Those parts are gritty and seem much more realistic (and are certainly much more interesting) than the primary case.

There are a number of murders, some tough guy talks by fixers from the accounting firm, a few scenes with Tank and his girlfriend, who is the daughter of a local mob boss with whom Tank is friendly, and who Tank brings in to help with the accounting firm parts, and an entirely unbelievable talk with the DA about blanket immunity for a group of Romanians up to and including murder if they have to be brought in to the accounting firm case.

Minus the group talks about the accounting firm, the book is a quick read, and fans of the genre will forgive the things like the DA’s immunity agreement, because those things make the story more interesting. Putting Tank’s brother’s death to rest by finding answers, but I think the two cases in this book would have been fine in a book devoted just to each.

Overall, a three star out of five read for me. Your mileage may vary.

Thanks to Random House/Ballantine and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: One True Patriot (Sean Parnell)

One True Patriot opens with a terrific chapter: Eric Steele, an Alpha in the so-super-secret-it-doesn’t-exist Program has done a HAHO (high altitude, high opening) parachute into Syria to off some terrorist baddies.

This is the third book in a series, and in this one, someone is killing off Alphas, and taking an ear off the corpse as some kind of souvenir. There are things I have questions about in this book.

First, this Program of alpha killers is headquartered in the White House. Although they have to move in this book, situating this at the White House seems rather odd, especially when it appears they are near the West Wing. I’m not sue I’m buying this.

Like any other book in this genre, they apparently have access to passports, credit cars, documents, and cash, plus someone on the other end of wherever they go (like Paris) to provide them with weapons. This is fine – I expect it in the genre.

What I don’t expect is when SpecOps people get themselves killed because they forget, for some reason, that they are SpecOps with enemies everywhere. The first Alpha killed, sure. They didn’t know anyone was specifically hunting them, or even that they existed, after all. But the second kill – and the lone female Alpha -has let her guard down because she received a text message that the assassin was dead. I’d think it would have been a good idea to confirm it with HQ, but alas for her, she did not. It also takes them a tad too long to figure out that there’s no way the assassin could know how many Alphas there are without some inside information.

The Program, having been hit by Russian hackers and this mysterious assassin, pulls everyone in and basically closes up shop. Steele, of course, charges off to investigate and make things right.

There’s a ton of action and killing in the book, no worries about that. From the US to France, Germany, and Russia itself (in a prison, no less) and back again to the US to thwart an attack on political leaders, this book has it all.

If you’re a fan of the genre, definitely read it. Even if you’re not a big fan of the genre and you’re casting about for something to read, you could do a lot worse.

Three stars out of five.

Thanks to HarperCollins/William Morrow and NetGalley for the review copy.

Review: Line of Sight (James Queally)

Line of Sight open with Russ Avery – former reporter, now PI – helping a dirty cop clean up a mess he’s made. So we know, at least, that Avery can cross a moral line.

Avery is subsequently offered a job by Key, a Black activist and friend, to look into the death of Kevin Mathis. Mathis’ death was determined to be just another drug-related shooting in a town that never lacks them. The twist on this is that Mathis was in possession of a video that appears to show a police officer shooting a friend of his. Mathis’ father, Austin, is convinced his son was also killed by a cop.

Avery, knowing that the release of that video would blow up, requests that they give him a little time to start asking around, and not release the video. The problem for Avery: if he starts asking questions about an officer-involved shooting, his steady stream of “fixing” for cops is going to dry up fairly quickly.

He goes on anyway, his reporter brain fully engaged. Along the way we meet retired cops, active cops, and – thankfully – the really dirty cop who appears in the video. I say thankfully, because sometimes, in books like this, the bad guy doesn’t show up until a few pages from the end of the book, and it’s impossible to even make an in informed guess of whodunnit.

There’s a decent amount of action, and there are protests not unlike current event here in the US as I type this, which bring to mind the Black Live Matter protests, when Key and Mathis’ father release the video to the press. Russ manages to get himself beat up, arrested, and given a very stern talking to by his ex-girlfriend, who is still employed at the paper from which he was fired.

Overall, I’m giving it four out of five stars. The opening is a little slow, but once things get moving, we are along for the ride as Avery pokes his nose into places the people in charge don’t want him to go.

Thanks to NetGalley and Polis Books for the reading copy.

Under Pressure – Robert Pobi – review

Under Pressure is the second book to feature Lucas Page, but the first I’ve read.

The opening is at the Guggeheim, where a ton of very wealthy people are present at a party for a high-tech environmental cleaning company (think fracking sites, and the like), with a multibillion dollar IPO looming. All seems rather genteel until a thermobaric bomb ignites, vaporizing the people and the art, leaving the building itself relatively intact.

Brett Kehoe, Special Agent In Charge/Manhattan, faced with the daunting task of sorting out 700+ dead and solving the mystery of why anyone would want to kill them, calls on ex-FBI agent, and current instructor at Columbia, Lucas Page to assist. Page is reluctant, but finally agrees, and we are whisked off to an almost nonstop ride of bombings, close calls, and mysteries that deepen as more people die.

At the heart of the mystery seems to be the Hockney brothers, William and Seth, and their sprawling megacorp. Are the bombings simply a statement against their companies, or is something more personal the core of it? While I have some issues with overly-complex conspiracies, and the habit, often, of main characters heading out into danger on their own, without telling anyone, to see if their reasoning/guess is correct about the bad guy, overall this was not a book killer.

Page, who lost a leg, arm, and eye in something he calls the Event, has a genius-level ability to instantly calculate areas, distances, see connections where others see none, and apparently possesses an eidetic memory. It reminded me quite a bit of the TV series Numb3rs. He is not terribly patient with people he views as stupid, is cranky a lot of times, and can be bitingly sarcastic. I liked him immensely.

Teasing out the mystery becomes more and more dangerous the closer Page gets to the truth, and in the end becomes, for him, a calculation of odds. To say more would give away too much. I will say this, though: be aware of the handcuffs. Chekov’s pistol has never been more apt.

Solid four stars.

Note: while there is enough backstory to know what has come before, I would suggest that if you intend to read the first book (City of Windows), you do that first before reading this. There’s a spoiler in this book for the last – it’s a blink and you miss it thing, but it’s there.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur for the reading copy.

The Last Agent

The Last Agent reunites us with Charles Jenkins, acquitted of espionage in the previous book The Eighth Sister, who has put the events of that book behind him and rebuilt his life. Or so he thinks.

A CIA agent shows up on his doorstep – again. After being rebuffed at Jenkins’ house, the agent corrals him at the local diner and tells him the agency needs him once more. For real, this time. They believe that Paulina Ponomayova, who saved Jenkins’ life in The Eighth Sister by giving her own, is not actually dead, but is being held in one of the toughest prisons in Russia. They’re not sure she’s there, or what information she may have given up on the other Sisters. They are sure that they want Jenkins to return to Russia, free her from the prison, and get her out of the country.

I wondered at this point just how long the author was going to push a 6′ 5″, 65 year old black man into a country where a) he sticks out like a 6′ 5″, 65 year old black man would in a rather overwhelmingly white country, and b) he’s already been there, is known to the FSB (the KGB’s successor), and has previously created havoc there.

Jenkins isn’t sure he wants to go, is definitely sure his wife and kids won’t want him to go, but does feel that he owes Paulina to help her if he can. Of course he signs on, and once again, he’s off to Mother Russia.

Viktor Federov is back (and on a side note, I would love to have a couple of books about THAT guy), retired now from the FSB thanks to his inability to catch Jenkins in The Eighth Sister. Jenkins blackmails him into assisting, first with figuring out a way to get Paulina out of the prison, and then getting all of them away safely.

I won’t spoil any of that except to say that the bank scene was quite funny, and one of the nonverbal discussions with Paulina is rather ingenious, relying on knowledge of where the cameras are and where the guards will be.

The chase that ensues – three targets instead of one – is now lead by a prototypical old KGB-style chief, who constantly silences his underlings, ignores the supposed lead investigator’s advice, but tells him failure will be on his head. When that investigator suddenly “retires” to take care of his father, it’s all out pursuit, by land, water, and even by air into another country’s airspace.

It’s a fun book, and better than The Eighth Sister, although readers will still have to up their suspension of disbelief game.

A solid four stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the reading copy.