Seafaring knowledge pairs well with a sharp, poised narrative voice.
The tale of a first-time marijuana smuggler finding love and searching for revenge on an East Malaysian island.
Tim Williams owes money to the wrong people. In 1974, he seeks help from his younger brother, Sonny, an engineer with sea experience who agrees to help transport tons of marijuana from Thailand back to San Francisco. Sonny doesn’t mind waiting on the Labuan Island for repairs and refueling thanks to the presence of beguiling nurse Kelli. The crew’s return trip is besieged by pirates and bad weather, but it’s a double cross that ultimately leads Sonny back to Labuan for vengeance. Cubbins (Smugglers’ Blues, 2007) packs a decent amount of information within very little narrative, and he does so quickly and admirably, solidifying the brothers’ shared history and setting up Sonny on the boat in under 20 pages. Sonny doesn’t seem to trust either the ragtag crew he’s stuck with or the dilapidated ship he’s on, but as a ship at sea is wont to do, the story changes course: Sonny comes to respect Capt. Cal and the crew, and he spends the bulk of his time with Kelli, a Labuan local. The narrative redirection is done with surprising ease, as the author gradually turns the story into what’s basically a love story. Yet the novel comes back with heightened suspense when the ship is loaded with marijuana—so many bales that some sit in the shower—and an enigmatic old man, supposedly the employer, is shockingly absent when Sonny and company wind up in prison. The mystery deepens when it comes to light that there’s someone else behind the drug dealing, and a tragedy pits a vendetta-minded Sonny against the most dangerous man of all. Cubbins’ straightforward writing style makes the book a quick read. At the same time, though, the narrative can be eloquently descriptive: Bob, one of the crew, looks as if “he could grow a beard in an afternoon.”
Seafaring knowledge pairs well with a sharp, poised narrative voice.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-1478104889
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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