SEPTEMBER 2012 - AudioFile
This haunting mystery begins with a best friend’s inexplicable suicide, which leads the protagonist into a labyrinth that eventually takes him to a shadowy secret kept by his aging father. Narrator Traber Burns is adept with the haunting material in this story of the 1970s Dirty War in Argentina. His simple declarative voicing takes listeners flawlessly into the troubled hearts of Cook’s latest champions. Burns’s timing and pacing are all listeners need to feel the passions of the two main characters locked in this unfolding mystery. M.C. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
"A striking example of a suspense writer working at the top of his form." —Los Angeles Times
"[A]n intelligent and elegant work." —The Wall Street Journal
BookPage
Reader Traber Burns’s mature voice is a perfect match for Philip, and he makes the most of the material.”
—Library Journal
Los Angeles Times
[Cook] knows how to spin a seductive tale.”
—Booklist
Booklist
[Cook] knows how to spin a seductive tale.”
—Booklist
Kirkus Reviews
Cook's 27th dip into his fictional characters' troubled past asks why an expatriate writer took his own life. Before he rowed out to the middle of a pond and slit his wrists, Julian Wells' most notable legacy was his shelf of meticulously researched true-crime studies of notorious serial killers. His death, however, creates a more poignant legacy for his sister Loretta, a failed actress and copy editor, and his old friend Philip Anders, a reviewer whose father, like Julian's, was a State Department functionary. Why would Julian have chosen to kill himself during a particularly quiet period of a largely uneventful life? Taking his cue from the dedication of Julian's first book--"For Philip, sole witness to my crime"--Philip retraces his friend's steps over three continents and 40 years, focusing at length on a trip the two of them took to Argentina, a rare journey that was not designed to produce background material for one of Julian's books. He recalls their friendship with Marisol Menendez, a guide to Buenos Aires who vanished into the deep shadows of the Casa Rosada during the dirty little war of the 1980s. As he interviews an activist priest, a Casa Rosada contact of his father's, and a Russian agent who earned the sobriquet the Rostov Ripper, Philip can feel himself getting closer to one of those grimly climactic epiphanies so characteristic of Cook (The Quest for Anna Klein, 2011, etc.). This time, however, the big reveal seems neither inevitable nor weighty enough to justify the weight of the portentous buildup. This sprawling update of Eric Ambler's A Coffin for Dimitrios lacks the baleful focus of its model, or of the most successful of Cook's own nightmare excavations of the past. Wait till next year.
