Published by Pinnacle Books on January 30, 2018
Tillie North is about to pass something along to her granddaughter when she’s killed in an explosion. Washington breathes a sigh of relief, since Tillie has somehow managed to amass embarrassing secrets since the days of the Truman administration. Tillie’s granddaughter, Ava North, is present when she dies, as is a fellow who works for the Gray Outfit named Thomas Laker. The Gray Outfit is one of those ultra-secret Homeland Security organizations that are so prevalent in thrillers. So what was Tillie planning to give Ava?
The story tracks back to 1941, when Tillie was in Hawaii, gathering information for Naval Intelligence by using her feminine guile (and body) to gather information from a Japanese diplomat. By the time they part, Tillie has gathered more information than she expected to learn, and more than she is willing to reveal to her minders, for reasons that suggest the government’s faith in Tillie’s patriotism has been badly misplaced. But really, it’s faith in Tillie’s intelligence that has been misplaced, given that Tillie comes across as a ditz who scarcely deserves the reverence with which she is viewed by the novel’s central characters.
In the present, the story follows Ava and Laker as they pursue the meaning of a cryptic notebook that Tillie left behind. The notebook has something to do with Tillie’s work the war, but the phrases she jotted on its pages make little sense, and the entries suddenly stop. Why Tillie believed that the best way to impart a secret to her granddaughter was to send her on a scavenger hunt for information is beyond me. Whispering in her ear would have done the trick without risking Ava’s inability to piece together Tillie’s obscure clues.
To uncover the notebook’s meaning, Ava and Laker interview people in Hawaii and Washington who knew Tillie. That leads them to a series of adventures of the sort that are common in thrillers: chases and fights and shootouts and so on.
Opposing Ava and Laker is a ridiculous fellow known as the Shapeshifter, whose job is to discover secrets and kill people. The Shapeshifter has an improbable (and nearly supernatural) ability to ferret out information, but characters like that are common in thrillers, and I’m willing to roll with them as long as their exploits aren’t consistently eye-rolling. Unfortunately, as the Shapeshifter tracked down three men, each of whom had inexplicably been given one piece of essential information that unlocks the novel’s puzzle, my eyes began to roll like tumblers on a slot machine. The ability of Ava and Laker to track the Shapeshifter’s movements is almost as difficult to swallow.
When Tillie’s big secret is finally revealed, I had to wonder how Washington could possibly have kept it a secret for so many years, and why the combined might of the nation’s military and intelligence services hadn’t managed to uncover the truth. There are other scenes in the novel that are just as difficult to believe. A bad guy who needs a building permit gets one from New York City in just a couple of days. A character who has been tied up suddenly gets her foot free to kick another character at an opportune moment. I might have been more willing to suspend my disbelief if the characters had been more interesting, but Laker and Ava have too little flesh on their bones. The novel as a whole lacks credibility, interest, and energy.
NOT RECOMMENDED