Another franchise in the Nick Stone industry.
Ex–Special Forces member McNab (Last Light, 2002, etc.), back in a fifth outing, continues his career of vicarious mayhem.
It’s one last assassination for British ex-pat, Bond-heir apparent, superspy-assassin Nick Stone—who doesn’t know why the Algerian convenience-store king Zeralda needs to die and doesn’t really care. After all, he’s a “K” who works on deniable missions for the Intelligence Service, and “I’d always tried to turn my back on the guilt, remorse, and self-doubt that always followed a job.” Nick brings Zeralda’s head home and doesn’t say a word. Will he now be able to put all that behind him and become a barman or a tour guide, get his US citizenship, and please the two women in his life, the love interest and the semi-estranged daughter? Fugeddaboudit. It takes only the knowledge that Zeralda was mixed up with Al Qaeda (not to mention little boys) to bring our hero back to action tout de suite (“Today was the day the covert three-man team I commanded was about to take the war to Al Qaeda”). He vaults back into his world of intrigue and gadgetry, working with men who are used to jabbering in Arabic on the Net (but he’ll manage) and encountering characters with names like Hubba Hubba, Leather Girl, and Goatee. And when the mission’s all over, the dirty bomb thwarted, etc., Hubba Hubba is quick to remind Nick that he wouldn’t want to be a barman anyway, and superspies were sort of a family, weren’t they? “I couldn’t be a student or a bartender,” Nick concedes. “I couldn’t do anything other than what I did.” McNab may be slipping a bit here in trying to churn out product to match the times: it’s up-to-date enough to refer to Mr. And Mrs. B. entertaining heads of state with Tex-Mex while bombs fall in Afghanistan. Still, McNab is as obsessed with detail as always.
Another franchise in the Nick Stone industry.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-0630-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.
An original take on a familiar pop-culture motif.
The “final girl” is a trope familiar to film scholars and horror-movie fans. She’s the young woman who makes it out of the slasher flick alive, the one who lives to tell the tale. After she survives a mass murder, the media tries to make Quincy into a final girl, but she refuses to play that part. Instead, she finishes college, finds a great boyfriend, and builds a comfortable life for herself on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s managed to bury her trauma under a mountain of Pinterest-ready sweets—she runs a successful baking blog—and psychological repression. Then another final girl, a woman who's tried to be a mentor to Quincy, dies of an apparent suicide, and the cracks in her carefully constructed world begin to show. Reporters come looking for her. So does Samantha Boyd, another survivor. It’s clear that Sam is trouble, but precisely what kind of trouble is one of the mysteries of this inventive, well-crafted thriller. Quincy might look like a model survivor, but that’s only because she’s managed to conceal both her reliance on Xanax and her penchant for petty theft. Quincy is convinced that she and Sam can help each other, but Sam’s bad habits mesh a little too neatly with Quincy’s own. As she begins to lose control, Quincy starts to doubt Sam as she gets ever closer to truths she’s managed to suppress. While most of the book is written from the heroine’s point of view, Sager weaves scenes from the night Quincy’s friends were slaughtered into the narrative. This is a clever device in that it gives readers information that Quincy can’t access even as it invites readers to question her claims of memory loss. Also, knowing the outcome of this horrible event makes watching it unfold nerve-wracking. This is not to say that readers can feel secure about knowing what they think they know. Sager does an excellent job throughout of keeping the audience guessing until the final twist.
A fresh voice in psychological suspense.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98536-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
A thrilling and satisfying sequel to the 1969 classic.
Over 50 years after an extraterrestrial microbe wiped out a small Arizona town, something very strange has appeared in the Amazon jungle in Wilson’s follow-up to Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.
The microparticle's introduction to Earth in 1967 was the disastrous result of an American weapons research program. Before it could be contained, Andromeda killed all but two people in tiny Piedmont, Arizona; during testing after the disaster, AS-1 evolved and escaped into the atmosphere. Project Eternal Vigilance was quickly set up to scan for any possible new outbreaks of Andromeda. Now, an anomaly with “signature peaks” closely resembling the original Andromeda Strain has been spotted in the heart of the Amazon, and a Wildfire Alert is issued. A diverse team is assembled: Nidhi Vedala, an MIT nanotechnology expert born in a Mumbai slum; Harold Odhiambo, a Kenyan xenogeologist; Peng Wu, a Chinese doctor and taikonaut; Sophie Kline, a paraplegic astronaut and nanorobotics expert based on the International Space Station; and, a last-minute addition, roboticist James Stone, son of Dr. Jeremy Stone from The Andromeda Strain. They must journey into the deepest part of the jungle to study and hopefully contain the dire threat that the anomaly seemingly poses to humanity. But the jungle has its own dangers, and it’s not long before distrust and suspicion grip the team. They’ll need to come together to take on what waits for them inside a mysterious structure that may not be of this world. Setting the story over the course of five days, Wilson (Robopocalypse, 2011, etc.) combines the best elements of hard SF novels and techno-thrillers, using recovered video, audio, and interview transcripts to shape the narrative, with his own robotics expertise adding flavor and heft. Despite a bit of acronym overload, this is an atmospheric and often terrifying roller-coaster ride with (literally) sky-high stakes that pays plenty of homage to The Andromeda Strain while also echoing the spirit and mood of Crichton’s other works, such as Jurassic Park and Congo. Add more than a few twists and exciting set pieces (especially in the finale) to the mix, and you’ve got a winner.
A thrilling and satisfying sequel to the 1969 classic.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-247327-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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