by Adam Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013
A high-velocity zombie-thriller that's as smart, daring and propulsive as the disparate stories it’s mashing up.
A rogue band of mercenaries discover more resistance than they imagined during a coordinated assault on Saddam Hussein’s treasure trove.
Though technically a prequel to Baker’s U.K. debut, Outpost (2011), this gritty, highly stylized desert adventure stands on its own as a contest of horror survival. The novel opens in Iraq, circa 2005. In an interesting turn, the mercenaries that drive the story aren’t all testosterone-fueled behemoths in the vein of The Expendables. In fact, this ragtag band of shooters is led by a woman, Lucy White, who commands a modernly diverse group of guns for hire who literally wear their trophies on their chests. Through Jabril Jamadi, an imprisoned member of Uday Hussein’s entourage, they hear rumors of a gold transport abandoned in the western desert—a target far too juicy to ignore. Seeking transport, they fall in with Jim Gaunt, a CIA contractor who’s eager to be welcomed into the fold of the Company. But Gaunt is serving two masters, taking his primary instructions from a field officer named Koell. The spooks have intel that indicates the site of the bullion, on the edge of the Syrian border, holds secrets that the Russians would kill to keep quiet. From these slender threads, Baker lights it up, pushing his prose and his characters to the limits of genre fiction. Adrenaline junkies will dig the crisply written combat sequences awash with bullet snaps and gunpowder fumes. Thriller enthusiasts will surely enjoy the mad scientist they find in the desert, safeguarding a deadly bioweapon with the potential for global disaster. Fans of The Walking Dead, which are approaching legion, can safely know that the Republican Guards waiting for them out in the desert are definitely of the undead variety. Is it all a bit lurid? Sure, but Baker’s imaginative set pieces, breathless pace and rough-and-tumble heroes give it a prepackaged for-the-movies sheen that’s hard not to enjoy.
A high-velocity zombie-thriller that's as smart, daring and propulsive as the disparate stories it’s mashing up.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-01767-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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 Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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