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Summary
Summary
In this gripping page-turner, an ex-agent on the run from her former employers must take one more case to clear her name and save her life.
She used to work for the U.S. government, but very few people ever knew that. An expert in her field, she was one of the darkest secrets of an agency so clandestine it doesn't even have a name. And when they decided she was a liability, they came for her without warning.
Now she rarely stays in the same place or uses the same name for long. They've killed the only other person she trusted, but something she knows still poses a threat. They want her dead, and soon. When her former handler offers her a way out, she realizes it's her only chance to erase the giant target on her back. But it means taking one last job for her ex-employers.
To her horror, the information she acquires only makes her situation more dangerous. Resolving to meet the threat head-on, she prepares for the toughest fight of her life but finds herself falling for a man who can only complicate her likelihood of survival. As she sees her choices being rapidly whittled down, she must apply her unique talents in ways she never dreamed of.
In this tautly plotted novel, Meyer creates a fierce and fascinating new heroine with a very specialized skill set. And she shows once again why she's one of the world's bestselling authors.
Author Notes
Stephenie Meyer was born in Hartford, Connecticut on December 24, 1973. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Brigham Young University. Her first novel, Twilight, was published in 2005 and was the beginning of the popular Twilight Saga, which includes New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. All the books within the Twilight Saga were made into feature-length films. Her first novel for adults, The Host, was published in 2008.
Meyer's novel The Chemist has been on several best seller lists including USA Today, Barnes and Noble and New York Times.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Actor Archer does a great job voicing this romantic thriller from Meyer. She uses three narrative tones: neutral for the book's third person narration; tough for when protagonist Alex, a former operative for a secret U.S. government agency that killed her mentor, is fighting to stay alive; and soft for when Alex is dreaming about or partaking in an unlikely romance. She also gives each of the secondary male characters his own clear and recognizable voice. Archer's pacing changes in accordance with the degrees of tension of the plot-and each scene is full of devastating new threats and clever new ways of thwarting them. Meyer fans will enjoy Archer's reading. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Let's call her Alex, though she has many names. One such name is the Chemist her moniker at the government agency responsible for high-tech torture, which formerly employed her. Now they want her dead: she knows too much. Years into Alex's hiding, they contact her to help them stave off a massive biological terror event that will kill hundreds of thousands. Despite her paranoia (she's the sort who sleeps in a gas mask and triggers her hotel rooms with booby traps), she nabs the target, a seemingly guileless school teacher and sets to torturing him with her array of chemical cocktails. These fast, smart, and brutal first 100 pages are Meyer's finest hour, proving she has the tools to pen thrillers with the best of them. From there, though, things go south. (Minor spoilers ahead.) Her target, Daniel, is proven innocent, and her mission a lie. Much of the rest of the book, then, feels oddly like Twilight, with Alex repeatedly celebrating how Daniel is good just as Bella droned on about how Edward was perfect. The main plot is far less interesting than the biological terror concept, and otherwise muscular writing is juvenilized by the overuse of fillers like um and words like squicky. Meanwhile, two rich themes the morality of torture and the sadness of being denied a normal life are barely addressed. For sure, this is a bittersweet book, one where Meyer proves her skills to doubters and then doesn't seem to know what to do with them.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
The Dry by Jane Harper; The Hermit by Thomas Rydahl; The Chemist by Stephenie Meyer; The Watcher by Ross Armstrong; The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer Parched and crackling after a two-year drought, the Australian town of Kiewarra is the highly combustible setting for Jane Harper's first novel The Dry (Little, Brown, [pound]12.99). Nature isn't the only thing that's dangerous in this small town in the middle of nowhere -- when policeman Aaron Falk returns from Melbourne to attend the funeral of childhood friend Luke Hadler, who apparently shot his wife and six-year-old son before turning the gun on himself, he finds a community rife with poverty, alcoholism and despair. It's Falk's first visit since he was run out of Kiewarra as a teenager, suspected of killing his classmate Ellie Deacon. Many people still believe he's guilty, and he wants to get out of the place as soon as possible. Hadler's parents, who have discovered that Falk and their son gave each other false alibis for the day of Ellie's death, persuade him to stay and investigate, and he finds himself trying to untangle two crimes that occurred 20 years apart. Solid storytelling that, despite a plethora of flashbacks, never loses momentum, strong characterisation and a sense of place so vivid that you can almost feel the blistering heat add up to a remarkably assured debut. Thomas Rydahl's first novel, The Hermit (Oneworld, [pound]16.99, translated by KE Semmel), which won the prestigious Glass Key award in Denmark, is set on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. The title is a misnomer: sixtysomething Erhard Jorgensen, an expat Dane, may live in a remote shack with only two goats for company, but, as a taxi driver-cum-piano tuner, he's familiar to many of the islanders. This comes in useful when a car containing a dead baby is found on a beach and Erhard, realising that the PR-conscious authorities are attempting a cover-up in order to avoid deterring tourists, decides to investigate. Although he knows nothing about computers, he calls in favours and finds himself drawn into a web of corruption. The pace may be stately, but a humane and appealing protagonist and plenty of local colour make this an engrossing and enjoyable read. The Chemist (Sphere, [pound]20) by Stephenie Meyer, bestselling author of the Twilight saga, is an awkward, not to say preposterous, hybrid of action thriller and romantic suspense. The eponymous chemist -- or, more accurately, torturer -- goes by a variety of aliases, but is usually known as Alex. Formerly in the employment of a secret US government agency, she was wont to extract confessions using chemical concoctions of her own devising until, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, her mentor was killed and she was forced to go on the run. At the start of the book, she is hiding out in a variety of heavily booby-trapped locations where she sleeps in a bath while wearing a gas mask and keeps a lot of gadgetry, including a pair of actual killer earrings, close at hand. Despite this, when an old colleague emails her, she agrees to kidnap and extract information from schoolteacher Daniel Beach who is, supposedly, part of a plot to release a deadly virus. After subjecting the poor man to considerable agony, she realises that it's a case of mistaken identity and apologises -- whereupon he falls in love with her. After a great deal of moving from place to place and hanging out, together with much canoodling and a makeover sequence, the pace picks up again, but it's too little, too late, and way too implausible. Ross Armstrong's debut The Watcher (Harlequin Mira) begins with a blizzard of attention-seeking staccato sentences -- the literary equivalent of being jabbed repeatedly with a pair of compasses -- but it's worth persevering for an eerily atmospheric reworking of Hitchcock's Rear Window with a nod towards The Girl on the Train, set in rapidly gentrifying north London. When troubled birdwatcher Lily turns her binoculars on her neighbours from her new-build flat, she realises that something sinister is happening in the marked-for-demolition block over the road. An elderly neighbour, Jean, tries to phone Lily just before she is killed, and, when the police are dismissive, Lily decides that she must investigate... An intriguingly unreliable narrator, plenty of suspense and the added bonus of name-spotting fun for Hitchcock aficionados. While it's not quite up there with her best (Blacklands, Rubbernecker), fans of Belinda Bauer certainly won't be disappointed by The Beautiful Dead (Bantam, [pound]12.99). Not only is Eve Singer struggling to care for her father, who has dementia, but her career as a TV crime reporter is threatened by younger and blonder talent, so, when a serial killer offers her the chance of a scoop, she bites. At first, the killer welcomes the publicity, but when Eve agrees to cooperate with the police in a news blackout, he turns on her. A disturbing, intelligent and, at times, genuinely moving story, The Beautiful Dead is written with subtlety and an impressive lightness of touch. - Laura Wilson.
Kirkus Review
A professional torturer on the run from her employers falls in with sexy twin brothers.You probably know Meyer as the then-27-year-old Mormon housewife who woke up from a dream about vampires and gave the world Twilight, though in addition to that series she has already published one adult thriller (The Host, 2008). In her latest, she marries the genres of spy versus spy and throbbing romance novel with good results. Meet Juliana, or Alex, or Casey, or Chriswhatever her alias of the moment is, she's an operative with a medical school background who specializes in chemically controlled torture and interrogation. Somewhere along the line, she learned too much about the secrets of her employers, and she now lives in a state of high-tech paranoia, sleeping in a bathtub wearing a gas mask in a secret location booby-trapped at every possible ingress. When her old boss calls her in for one last mission, she's not sure she isn't being double-crossedbut nonetheless proceeds with the kidnapping of Washington, D.C., schoolteacher Daniel Beach, who's purportedly part of a vile plot to release a virus that will wreak global doom. In fact, he is a man whose deep inner goodness is rivaled only by his scorching outer hotnessbut our socially awkward virgin heroine won't realize this until after she's taken him to her secret lair, stripped him naked, strapped him to a table, and injected him with compounds that produce pure agony for 10 minutes at a time. The biochemical magic between them is even more powerful than the nasty drugs, and by the time his identical twin brother, a swashbuckling black-ops type, shows up to kill her and rescue him, love has bloomed in the torture chamber. As they begin to see through the layers of cross and double cross, the two agents decide to join forces and go into hiding together, with the brother of course, on a ranch in Texas with a pack of trained superdogs. A tale of skulduggery, bodice rippery, and shoot-'em-up action unfolds, complete with help from a luscious mistress of disguise who could have stepped right out of a James Bond novel. Rated B for badass. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
She's been running for three years, but an email from her former black ops employer promises to change everything. So Alex, an interrogation specialist, thought. After kidnapping and questioning Daniel Beach, the man identified as her target, Alex learns that this was a trap meant to eliminate her through a former CIA operative who also happens to be Daniel's brother, Kevin. Now the three are being hunted for a secret that reaches into the upper echelons of the U.S. government. When Kevin is apprehended, Alex and Daniel realize that they must make one final, dangerous move that will either save them or destroy them all. Verdict The best-selling author of the "Twilight" series and The Host has written an entertaining, fast-paced, action-packed thriller, with some light romance added to the mix. Definitely more appropriate for Meyer's adult fans, but also a fun read for those who appreciate the lighter side of spy fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 7/25/16.]-Laura Hiatt, Fort Collins, CO © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
