by Wanjiku wa Ngugi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2014
By the end, readers will be too befuddled to care.
A Kenyan expatriate, now a pampered New York soccer mom, becomes a super sleuth and sharpshooter in a matter of days as she investigates an international human trafficking operation that branches out into even more sinister enterprises.
This debut is original, if confusing. The narrative teems with menacing characters, global conspiracies and gun battles that rock protagonist Mugure Sivonen’s world. Mugure is married to wealthy attorney Zack, and they live comfortably with their adopted 5-year-old son, Kobi. When Mugure discovers a scrap of paper with a phone number and Kobi’s name written on it, she’s propelled into a dark world of criminal activity that appears to center around the adoption agency that delivered Kobi to their door. The Kasla Agency was recommended by Zack’s friend Mark, a millionaire landscaper who reputedly employs illegals. Mark also is married to Mugure’s friend, Melinda, a singer, but she divorces him before she leaves New York to perform in other countries, including at Kenya’s Festival of Rags. Soon, Mugure lives in a constant state of paranoia, and almost everyone she comes into contact with is suspect—a mysterious caller, a frightening gunman, an ominous curio shop owner, a crazed 75-year-old carjacker—not to mention some members of her social circle who also seem rather shady. Mugure’s unsure whom to trust, so she grabs Kobi and ends up in Ohio at an old friend’s home, where, in a flash, she becomes a crack shot with every gun she handles. She also decides her son will be safe if she leaves him there while she heads to Kenya to find the answers to all of her questions. And she has a bunch. There, two more old friends come to her aid and help her meet more shady characters, visit witnesses, break into buildings, and engage in chases and gunfights with the bad guys. At one point, Mugure displays her superhuman powers by shooting with both hands—remember, she’s only recently learned to shoot—and disarms an adversary with a defensive kick to his hand. Before all issues are wrapped up, Mugure addresses a few subplots involving relatives and sorts through what seems like a cast of thousands to figure out who the bad guys really are.
By the end, readers will be too befuddled to care.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1491-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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