I wish to thank NetGalley, Thomas & Mercer, and the author for providing me with an ARC of The Silent Sisters in exchange for my unbiased review. This novel was a real pleasant surprise for me. I usually read thrillers, but I entered the Giveaway contest for this book as the plot looked interesting. It wasn't long before I was pulled into the story and was totally engrossed thereafter. I read the book in 4 days which is really fast for me. I will not re-summarize the plot, only to say that the author does an excellent job in depicting the potentially devastating consequences when family members are not honest with each other.

Ms. Chamberlain is a talented writer, and the prose flowed nicely, especially with the short chapters. I liked the way the POV switched often between Riley and Jade; this was never confusing as the chapters were well-labelled. This technique resulted in excellent character development of the two protagonists. I re I carried my duffel bag upstairs, where a wide hallway opened to four rooms. The first was my father's bedroom with its quilt-covered queen-sized bed. The second room had been Danny's, and although he hadn't slept in our house since leaving at eighteen— escaping, he would call it--it would always be "Danny's room" to me. The third room was mine, though in the years since I'd lived in the house, the room had developed an austere air about it. I'd cleaned out my personal possessions bit by bit after college. The memorabilia from my high school and college years—pictures of old boyfriends, yearbooks, CDs, that sort of thing—were in a box in the storage unit of my Durham apartment waiting for the day I got around to sorting through them. There were many times in the book when I was thinking “oh, no Joanne” “not again Joanne” “how can you still help her”. You feel a whole range of emotions, anger at how Joanne is, treat by her mother Bernadette, her Nanny Pat, Mark and then finally Tom. The only light this child had in her life was her father’s parents, Nanny Edith & Grandad John, who were both deaf and communicated with Joanne via sign language. It is later in life when Joanne has a child who is deaf, some would say “something else for Joanne to cope with”. Joanne doesn’t see it that way, she sees her son as a special gift from her Nanny Edith. Everything seems okay at the beginning of this book, Joanne lives in a house with her mother Bernadette and her father Michael. Things weren’t great between her parents but the first time Joanne seems to really notice is when aged six, she receives separate presents from her parents and ends up receiving exactly the same gift from them both. From the very day she was born Joanne Lee’s life was a challenge. No child should be treated the way she was. Her mother was uncaring and cold towards her and was not nurturing and caring at all. Mum more often than not did not prepare meals of any type and did not like to do housework either. Their home was squalid and stinking. She merely sat on the sofa proclaiming ‘I can’t be arsed’ with housework. She had a string of boyfriends who sometimes took notice of Joanna and tried hard to improve her life, but she didn’t like or encourage them, such was her desire to have her mother for herself. What she really wanted most of all was her mother to be a mother to her. Her mother had another baby and Joanne became a mother to her baby sister and then to her baby brother. Her mother hardly ever got up to see her children to school and Joanne became carer for all three of them when boyfriends had had enough of Bernadette’s slovenly ways, her drinking and her unacceptable behaviour.She's my best friend. No matter what life throws at her, she has such a positive outlook. She's strong mentally, she's funny, witty, clever. "Because I had her so young [at 19], it's almost like we're mates. I'm so proud of that fact because I never had that with my mother." In my opinion, The Silent Sisters is the best of the three books. Here Dugoni gives us a more in depth glimpse into how the sisters have been operating as moles and how they avoided detection. Dugoni is a master at creating tension as he meticulously details out every cloak and dagger encounter. You feel it when you walk with Petrekova as she is trying to avoid being followed. Or in Kulikova's response to her husband about how odd the wrong number calls to their house are. I'm nervous even when she says she's taking the dog out for a walk. This time the story focuses on more than the escape out of Russia. The Sisters, Russian mafia, local police, FSB internal dynamics, Russia/U.S. relations... Dugoni weaves the multiple plot lines together seamlessly, while keeping the pacing tight.

With only two left in the country, Jenkins will have to hunt them down and ensure they are safe, before trying to get them stateside for added protection. The trouble is, Jenkins is also a fugitive from the Russian authorities and they are on the hunt for him, sure to skin him alive when he is caught. It’s a precarious balance, but surely one that is needed to keep America safe from its renewed enemy.In addition to these deadly games of matching wits among spies, Dugoni has emphasized one other theme in this trilogy -- age is just a number. Jenkins isn't the only hero who is at the age in which retirement is the usual occupational status. This has been true in the preceding installments but this theme is supported by a larger cast of characters in this novel. In The Silent Sisters, Jenkins is willing to risk his life once more on behalf of the seven sisters even though his multiple prior visits to Russia have earned him a spot on Putin's kill list. And because of an error in judgment, Jenkins inadvertently catches the attention of both the very violent Russian mafiya and the police, in particular an appealing Hercule Poirot-like figure. Both parties possess compelling motivation as the former lost a family member and the latter - Senior Investigator Arkhip Mishkin - wants to retire with his impeccable case resolution rate. In this pulse-racing thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Agent, an American sleeper cell in Russia goes silent—and it’s one man’s duty to find them. So... rather than a 'whodunit' mystery, it's more a 'whydunit' mystery. The reader is always wondering 'why' .... why did Lisa kill herself? Or did she? They never found her body. Why or why not? She carried the guilt for many years for helping her mother dispose of the decomposed body of her baby sister Helen, it was not until later in her life that she discovered Helen was only one of four babies that her sex-crazed alcoholic mother had secretly given birth to, whether they were stillborn as her mother claimed or whether she killed or let them die of neglect we will probably never know.

What I enjoyed was the comfortable easy tone --- my emotions were never TOO HIGH or TOO LOW.... or TOO CRITICAL. Upbeat and truly happy in her life now, it's difficult to believe that she was sexually abused by her father, unprotected by her slovenly mother and then married a violent man who battered her senseless even when she was pregnant with Martine. QUEEN of the misery memoir Jenny Tomlin, mother of actress Martine McCutcheon, is not as tragic as you might imagine. It’s dangerous for Charlie: he’s on a Kremlin kill list, and his wife isn’t happy that he is going to risk his life yet again, but he managed to extract a woman from the notorious Lefortovo prison, so if the women will trust anyone, it will be him. The CIA upskills him in tech and devices and equips him with disguises and the necessary papers, and he enters Moscow very much under the radar.of the books I read are strictly romance but sometimes I need a mystery/thriller/suspense to spice things up a bit and The Silent Sister seemed like a good choice. Overall, I was left somewhat underwhelmed, but I had a blast unraveling this intricately-woven mystery! The Silent Sisters is the third book in the Charles Jenkins series by American author, Robert Dugoni. When the CIA becomes aware of a Kremlin program to expose the remaining two of the Seven Sisters, and the women go silent, they decide to send Charles Jenkins in to ascertain if the women need to be exfiltrated from Moscow, or have turned.

This is the second book of this author that I finished and once again I am emotionally invested in the deftly plotted, immensely readable, and masterfully executed saga of a family in crisis. The Silent Sisters is the third book in the Charles Jenkins spy trilogy, about a former CIA operative charged with rescuing long-established sleeper agents from the Russian Government. I think this one makes a lot more sense if you’ve read the previous two, to understand the various characters, but ironically I would probably have enjoyed this more as a stand-alone, as knowing what had gone before made the premise of this one all the more preposterous.

Contents

As with all his books, The Silent Sisters was well written and kept me on my toes. There is action, there is danger, there is retribution, there is intrigue, and there are complications. You will like some characters, dislike some characters, be amused by some characters, and shake your head at others. So..the mystery is WHY. Why would Riley's family go to so much trouble to concoct a lie and convince everyone their daughter was dead? And what really happened to her? and written more like a memoir which is more to my liking. This book is all about the life of Joanne and how she broke open the shell and exposed the secrets of her mother's terrible crimes. Joanne's mother was not like other mothers. Right from the start of the book Joanne is left on her own to do most things feed herself, and do her own laundry at a very young age. Her mother was acting more like the child in their relationship and it made things very difficult growing up, she even had to take care of her younger siblings. I thought that this book was going to be mostly about the crime that took place however that wasn't even mentioned until the end part of the book. Most of the story was about how Joanne's mother was neglectful and left all the responsibility to her eldest daughter. Now these kinds of books I usually enjoy, and I did super enjoy this book I just had a very different mind set on what this book was going to be about when I started it based on the cover descriptions that I read. When by cleaning up a filthy house Joanne finds a box with the remains of not just one new born but four, she decides enough is enough and this leads her to take action. I found Joanne's character The Silent Sisters is a tension filled espionage thriller with impossibly great characters and is a fitting end to the Sisters trilogy. To get the entire experience I would not read The Silent Sisters until I read the first two books.