The Cobra by: Frederick Forsyth
From the Publisher –
An extraordinary cutting-edge thriller from the New York Times-bestselling grandmaster of international suspense.
Meticulous research, crisp narratives, plots as current as today's headlines-Frederick Forsyth has helped define the international thriller as we know it. And now he does it again.
What if you had carte blanche to fight evil? Nothing held back, nothing off the table. What would you do? For decades, the world has been fighting the drug cartels, and losing, their billions of dollars making them the most powerful and destructive organizations on earth. Until one man is asked to take charge. Paul Devereaux used to run Special Operations for the CIA before they retired him for being too ruthless. Now he can have anything he requires, do anything he thinks necessary. No boundaries, no rules, no questions asked.
The war is on-though who the ultimate winner will be, no one can tell...
Crossfire by: Dick Francis Felix Francis
Publishers Weekly –
In the enjoyable fourth and final collaboration between Francis (1920-2010) and son Felix (after Even Money), the army career of Capt. Thomas Forsyth abruptly ends when an IED in Afghanistan blows off one of his feet, leaving him with a prosthetic replacement (like another Francis lead, Sid Halley). Upon discharge from National Health Service care, Forsyth makes his way home to Lambourn, where he gets a less-than-warm welcome from his mother, Josephine Kauri, a horse trainer. After learning that her stable has had a series of mishaps, Forsyth discovers that Kauri has been sabotaging her own animals in response to a blackmailer's threats to reveal her tax evasion to the authorities. With nothing else to occupy him, he turns detective to identify the extortionist. Though the plot details won't linger as long as those in Dick Francis's best work, like Whip Hand, this is still a suspenseful read. Francis aficionados will hope that Felix chooses to carry on the family tradition on his own.
Publishers Weekly –
Barton (Dead by Midnight) delivers a solid mix of romance and terror in her latest thriller. When the bodies of kidnapped women are discovered with long-dead babies in their arms, J.D. Cass of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation gets called in. Therapist Audrey Sherrod, a counselor for families of the victims, has dark secrets in her own family's past. The two despise each other at first, but are slowly brought together when Audrey befriends J.D.'s rebellious teenage daughter, Zoe. Barton paces the romance nicely, intertwining it with the mystery and an ever-growing list of suspects. Occasional sloppy prose hurts the flow of the book, but readers willing to overlook this will enjoy the action sequences and the leads' antagonistic attraction as well as the assorted twists in the murder case.
A Gate at the Stairs by: Lorrie Moore
From the Publisher –
In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America (“[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability” —James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.
Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.
As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.
Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny.
The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.
As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.
The Last Lie by: Stephen White
Publishers Weekly –
In White's winning 18th Alan Gregory thriller (after The Siege), the Boulder, Colo., psychologist gets off on the wrong foot with his new neighbor, TV-star lawyer Mattin Snow, by walking his dogs on Snow's property. In the wake of Snow's housewarming party, to which Alan wasn't invited, an unnamed female guest claims Snow raped her. Before the case can hit the press, the lawyers for both Snow and the victim close ranks and begin to work out a private financial settlement with the victim agreeing not to testify (a parallel to the real-life Kobe Bryant case a few years back, also in Colorado). Gregory becomes entangled in the case ethically when he learns that the victim is the client of a psychologist-in-training whom he's supervising. Series fans will enjoy catching up with the domestic doings of Alan and his wife, Lauren, who are beginning to patch up their marriage following recent infidelities, and their two children.
No comments:
Post a Comment