Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This new Preston and Child collaboration brings their Helen Trilogy to a slam-bang, breathless close, with their astonishingly resourceful hero, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, single-handedly storming a Nazi stronghold in a South American jungle in his search for his wife's murderer. It's the culmination of a panoply of wildly improbable events. But that's what readers of the series have come to cherish, along with noble heroes and despicable, seemingly unstoppable villains-e.g. sociopaths, science-bred to Aryan perfection. Rene Auberjonois has narrated enough of these thrillers to have developed not just the perfect vocal match for the erudite, stern-willed Pendergast, but the ability to capture the books' mysterious, gothic, almost phantasmagoric moods. Even better, his long career as a stage and screen performer has provided him with the talent and experience to understand that, sometimes, when action and emotions are pushed to extremes, it's wiser to underplay the scene. A Grand Central hardcover. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
In this conclusion to the authors' Helen trilogy (Fever Dream; Cold Vengeance), Special Agent Pendergast finally discovers what happened to his wife, Helen, who was supposedly mauled by a lion while game hunting in Africa 15 years ago but who may have been kidnapped and forced to collaborate in her own death. Having lost the kidnappers' trail, Pendergast is asked to investigate a string of mysterious hotel fires in Manhattan, and the clues lead him to South America and the kidnappers. -VERDICT Across these three titles, Preston and Child weave a dense and, oftentimes, boring and unimpressive plotline running over 1200 pages. With the final volume, eager fans will at last learn what really happened to Helen-unfortunately after plodding through a lot of insignificant and inconsequential details. Regardless, order multiples. [See Prepub Alert, 6/3/12.]-Jerry P. Miller, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Preston and Child's (Cold Vengeance, 2011, etc.) thriller completes the Helen trilogy featuring the weird and unworldly Aloysius Pendergast, special agent for the FBI. The conclusion opens with Pendergast called to meet Helen, the wife he presumed dead, in New York City's Central Park. There's a touching, tentative reunion, and then Der Bund strikes again, kidnapping Helen and leaving Pendergast wounded. Pendergast offers a treatise on detection perfection, tracing Helen from hither and yon to Sonora, Mexico. There's another shootout. Helen's killed, and principal bad guy, Wulf Konrad Fischer, escapes. Pendergast retreats to his Dakota apartment in New York City and into a grief-and-guilt-driven drug addiction. Friends intervene. Lt. D'Agosta, city police detective, pleads for Pendergast to help search for a serial killer. Corrie Swanson, criminal justice student, is in danger after stumbling on a Nazi safe house in her quest to help Pendergast. With Pendergast's aid, Corrie takes refuge with her estranged father, only to find him framed for a bank robbery. Psychiatrist Dr. John Felder discovers the institutionalized Constance Greene may truly be a century and a half old. Pendergast, intrigued by the bizarre serial murders, applies DNA analysis, which leads him to think the murderer is his brother Diogenes, a villain supposedly dead in a Sicilian volcano. Further analysis reveals truths even more grotesque. The most simplistic of the narratives follows Corrie clearing her father; the most gothic follows Felder seeking proof of Greene's age; and the most violent follows Pendergast as he uncovers secrets about Helen and then takes revenge by breaching a Nazi refuge in Brazil. Pendergast's narrative offers angst and ample bloodletting in gothic locales and confrontations with the issue of Mengele's twins experiments mated with quantum mechanics and genetic manipulation. If Preston and Child fans haven't read the first two volumes in the Helen trilogy, confusion will reign. Pendergast--an always-black-clad pale blond polymath, gaunt yet physically deadly, an FBI agent operating without supervision or reprimand--lurks at the dark, sharp edge of crime fiction protagonists.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
