by Bill Fitzhugh ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2012
Despite the high body count, the knockabout drive-in movie plotting and scattershot satire (think Godzilla with a laugh...
Those madcap bug-wielding assassins from Pest Control (1996) are back, and this time the stakes are even higher and the humor even lower.
Six years after faking their deaths to escape the wrath of Miguel DeJesus Riviera, the drug lord whose brother they had killed, Bob Dillon and Klaus Müller one day hear a too-good-to-be-true offer from Joshua Treadwell, of Blue Sky Capital Partners, LLC, to fund their genetic research into all-natural extermination—that is, superbugs with an insatiable appetite for killing other bugs—by developing a cadre of counterterrorist bugs that are willing to kill people. Apart from its innate looniness, the only downside of Treadwell’s offer is that his ability to track down Bob and Klaus means that their cover is blown, which gives them one more reason to relocate from Oregon to L.A. one step ahead of the wave of contract killers the surviving Riviera has loosed on them. Once the exterminators are safely ensconced in La-La Land, there’ll be after-Oscar parties, double-crosses by double agents, brushes with other assassins and of course hordes of killer bugs whose victims rapidly spiral into the hundreds. Along the way, Fitzhugh (Radio Activity, 2004, etc.) finds time to skewer such ripe targets as the CIA, network-news broadcasts, Hollywood pitch sessions, talk-radio blowhards and millenialist Christians.
Despite the high body count, the knockabout drive-in movie plotting and scattershot satire (think Godzilla with a laugh track) are all in good fun. Don’t believe a word of it when you hear once again that the heroes have died.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59058-540-5
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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