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The Devil's Handshake

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A former British Special Forces officer becomes a billionaire businessman and finds the corporate world and global politics just as bloodthirsty as the battlefield in Reagan’s debut thriller, the first in a proposed series.
Years after Sir Thomas Litchfield has left the Special Air Service, he’s built his own empire as owner of the TLH Group, a national resources company worth $60 billion. But it’s Thomas’ latest deal—with Adwalland, a new African country rich in natural resources—that has caught the attention of Russia, which hopes to re-establish itself as a military power by constructing a Naval base in Adwalland. Thomas’ negotiations benefit both TLH and the Russian president, an old friend. Thomas, however, has no choice but to contend with ex-pirate Wasir Osman Hassan, the interior minister who controls security in Borama, Adwalland’s capital. These associations put Thomas under surveillance from the CIA and both Russia’s and Britain’s foreign intelligence agencies. But a cold war may become heated when Thomas and his security team have to stop Wasir from staging a coup d'état. The author’s gleefully convoluted narrative brims with characters and plot points, following Thomas throughout the years—on an Iraq mission; as an entrepreneur; and saving 19-year-old Nara from her pimp, Oleg, in Turkmenistan. Thomas’ back story is well-developed; he falls in love with Nara, and the two have a daughter, Victoria. He’s also estranged from his father and blames him for his mother’s death. The number of characters can be overwhelming, but there are standouts, including Secret Intelligence Service agent Rebecca Leiris, who has watched Thomas for a long time and has a personal vendetta against Wasir, who killed her fiance. The story’s impact is a bit diminished by extensive grammatical errors, such as missing punctuation, which thorough proofreading could have prevented. Reagan ends his novel on a high note with rising tensions in Borama, which lead to hefty action scenes. And there’s room for sequels with the gaps in Thomas’ timeline, including much of the early 2000s.
Readers may be distracted by grammatical issues, but Reagan turns his 500-plus pages into a searing epic.

Pub Date: May 14, 2014

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 482

Publisher: Brightquart Rights

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2014

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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