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
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
