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DRAGON’S EYE

A masterly depiction of modern Shanghai and an admirable hero fall victim to excessive length and intrusive, improbable...

High-level corruption and the chaos of modern China darken the perilous life of an honest policeman investigating a gruesome multiple murder.

Accompanied by his trusty, perpetually hungry sidekick Yaobang, Senior Investigator Sun Piao slogs across the muddy shore of Shanghai’s Huangpu River to face a nauseating sight. Eight bodies lie chained together, each corpse violated in the same disgusting way. Their eyeballs are gone, their fingertips have been clipped off, and they appear to have been eviscerated. Piao has immediate warning that this is going to be a political as well as criminal nightmare when Party officials show up and warn him off the case and the tame medical investigator plays dumb. Refusing to be spooked, Piao goes outside channels and sends the bodies to a meat locker for investigation by Yaobang’s young brother, a terrified med student. Piao seems a little slower than the average reader to understand that the missing kidneys and hearts have to do with one of China’s growth industries, medical transplants. He may be excused, as the pace of perpetrators to eliminate the evidence is fast and violent. The bodies disappear when the meat locker is torched and its owner, Piao’s cousin Chen, and Yaobang’s brother are butchered, but not before Piao gets the postmortem and learns that four of the victims were jailbirds, two of them American, and one a pregnant female. One of the Americans was Robby Hayes, whose mother Barbara, an American mandarin, inserts herself in the case and into Piao’s unlucky love life. Evidence leads Piao to his own superior and even further up to the aged Party grandee who stole Piao’s beautiful young wife. Even when he is framed for murder and ordered off the case, Piao pursues and perseveres, narrowing in on a suave British surgeon with seemingly impenetrable protection.

A masterly depiction of modern Shanghai and an admirable hero fall victim to excessive length and intrusive, improbable American politics.

Pub Date: April 26, 2004

ISBN: 1-58567-495-8

Page Count: 460

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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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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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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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

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