A flawed but entertaining tale of assassins and diverting character interactions.
In Arvind’s debut thriller, a young Indian woman trained in weapons and combat goes after the group of people responsible for her parents’ deaths.
After professionals, possibly American, kidnap 20-year-old Sonia, they let her go for reasons not exactly clear. This does, however, seemingly indicate that she’s in danger, along with the family with whom she lives in Bangalore. Her uncle, aunt, and cousin flee to Cape Town, South Africa, but Sonia stays behind. Her parents died in an explosion years ago, but they left their daughter a list of 11 intelligence and investigative agents they suspected of wanting to murder them. Sonia first seeks out Rohan, whose parents died in the same bombing and with whom Sonia shares a romantic past from five years earlier. Sonia and the team of friends she ultimately assembles have all undergone combat training, but Rohan has not. So the group trains him in archery and other skills he may need. Sonia and her friends plan to take out the targets in various cities throughout India. They will just have to overcome hurdles such as in-fighting among the team’s couples (or potential couples) as well as the authorities who are pursuing them for homicides they may or may not have committed. Arvind’s surprisingly upbeat story of assassins regularly focuses on the team’s conflicts. These feel lighthearted compared to the periodic hits, even when reunited exes resort to a physical scuffle. But some of the story consists of outright comedy, particularly Sonia’s distaste for beards and her designating Rohan’s as one of his most dreadful traits. At the same time, the assassinations end quickly, which tones down the violence. As welcome as it is to see female characters who are as strong as the males, the novel abounds with grammatical errors (such as using “your” instead of “you’re”) and occasional bizarre phrasing (“At sharp 6:45 am”). Arvind also leaves out some pertinent details, from that of a target’s actual death to how a “mini-gun” on Sonia’s finger works.
A flawed but entertaining tale of assassins and diverting character interactions.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4828-3780-3
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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