Take my wife — please!
Henny Youngman might have said the line in jest, but many husbands in ABANDONED, the latest thriller in paperback from Cody McFadyen, are serious. And a criminal mastermind is more than willing to oblige. For a price, he makes their spouses disappear without a trace. No ransom note. No clues. Just gone.
The killer provides a solution for desperate men with “problematic” wives who don’t want to endure messy divorces. Such a man can keep his house, retain custody of his children and get on with his life. All he has to do is file a missing persons report, wait seven years for the case to close, and collect the life insurance. It’s the ultimate deal with the devil.
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THE VENONA CABLE is the third book in Brent Ghelfi’s series featuring Alexei Volkovoy, aka Volk, a criminal who is also a Russian undercover agent. In the past, he’s infiltrated the Russian mob, but this time, he travels to the United States to uncover secrets that people want buried in the past — one that involves Volk’s father, a former Russian Air Force pilot who joined the GRU and then defected to the U.S. just before Volk was born.
Volk must uncover the World War II-era secrets of the classified Venona cables, and in doing so, he hopes to learn about the father he never knew and, in the process, clear his family name.
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Take my wife — please!
Henny Youngman might have said the line in jest, but many husbands in ABANDONED, the latest thriller from Cody McFadyen, are serious. And a criminal mastermind is more than willing to oblige. For a price, he makes their spouses disappear without a trace. No ransom note. No clues. Just gone.
The killer provides a solution for desperate men with “problematic” wives who don’t want to endure messy divorces. Such a man can keep his house, retain custody of his children and get on with his life. All he has to do is file a missing persons report, wait seven years for the case to close, and collect the life insurance. It’s the ultimate deal with the devil.
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From the freakish illustration on the front cover, to the summary on the back cover, and everything in between, Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie’s D.D. MURPHRY, SECRET POLICEMAN left me confused.
The collaboration by authors Alan M. Clark and Elizabeth Massie claims to be “a clever tale told with a dexterity that allows for a gritty, noir feel, insight into the frailty of the human mind and the ability to see the absurdity in it all.” They also describe the lead character as a hero and a villain and that I was supposed to be cringing while I laughed and rooted him on.
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In JULIET, NAKED, Nick Hornby has created a story about three lost individuals, and how they come to find themselves and each other. Annie and Duncan, a stagnant couple, have been together for 15 years. Annie loves Duncan — or at least thinks she does — but soon discovers she’s fallen out of love with him. Duncan loves Annie, but he cares about singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe more. I’m talking an obsessive, big-time man-crush.
Tucker, who’s compared to Bob Dylan, reached his peak in the 1980s, and promptly quit the business, walking away without a trace. It was hard for me to understand Tucker’s music since he’s a fictional character. It helped when I pictured a 50-year-old Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley, the only difference being that Tucker is still alive and kicking, albeit in self-imposed seclusion in Pennsylvania.
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