Beyond Gone

March 1, 2020
Simon Fisk, the Return Specialist, combs northern Nigeria for a kidnapped teen with secretly fearsome connections. Scores of young women are abducted every year by the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist group Rusul Alharb. But very few of them have the pedigree of Adaku Oni, 16, who's actually Peace Corps volunteer Kishana Coleman, granddaughter of U.S. Secretary of State James Coleman, who's been posing as a Sudanese aid worker. Like most grandparents, the secretary would do anything to get his beloved granddaughter back, and in his case, that includes luring Simon to Africa under false pretenses and framing him for murder (the stick), then promising him a new start in life and a free ride to college for his daughter, Hailey, whom Simon found many years after her own kidnapping (Gone Cold, 2015) and stashed in Moldova with his lover, former Warsaw attorney Anastazja Staszak (the carrot). Only after Simon agrees to look for Kishana does Coleman add a condition: He'll be accompanied by Simon's own college girlfriend, Jadine Visser, whom Coleman has undisclosed reasons for wanting to tag along. Jadine, a professor at the University of Cape Town, has none of the professional credentials Simon would normally require of anyone joining him on such a dangerous mission. But he reluctantly accepts her companionship and leaves the city for the hinterlands that are Rusul Alharb's stronghold. That's where he'll find unwilling informants, unreliable allies, and disconcerting evidence that Kishana may well have been radicalized by her captors, reunited with her father, Rusul Alharb member Ahmad Abdulaziz, and turned into a killing machine herself. A starchy blend of action and suspense fueled by well-placed surprises that frequently upstage the violent set pieces.

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March 16, 2020
Corleone’s unconvincing fourth Simon Fisk thriller (after 2015’s Gone Cold) takes Fisk, a PI who specializes in overseas abduction cases of children by noncustodial parents, to South Africa, ostensibly to retrieve a Staten Island schoolteacher’s son, only to find that he’s been set up by U.S. Secretary of State James Coleman. Coleman’s 16-year-old granddaughter, Kishana, “a Peace Corps volunteer posing as a Sudanese aid worker with no ties to the United States,” was one of the victims of a recent mass abduction of girls from a Christian enclave in Nigeria. The secretary offers “the best psychiatric counseling in the Western hemisphere” for Fisk’s traumatized 19-year-old daughter, Hailey (she was kidnapped as a child and years later suspected of murder), as well as a free ride to the college of her choice, if he agrees to save Kishana from her terrorist captors. Fisk accepts, despite the daunting nature of the mission. Strained similes (the “brakes screeched like a pack of rabid hell hounds”) don’t help. Readers who prize action over logic may find something to enjoy.