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
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.
Helped by a beautiful grifter, the “Camel Club”—the four-man band of conspiracy theorists—returns to battle a threat to national security.
Annabelle Conroy is con-artist extraordinaire; Jerry Bagger, mobster and mark; and Roger Seagraves, master assassin. All come straight from central casting. Seagraves is killing high-level government officials, and Conroy is putting together the con of the century, with Bagger as the target. The mysterious death of a rare-books expert at the Library of Congress launches the story, which splits off at first into two different plotlines. In one, Conroy and her team work their way up to their major score. In the other, the Camel Club investigates the mysterious death of a close friend. Things are slightly more exciting in Conroy’s world. She’s assembling her team, eager to settle an old score by taking down Atlantic City’s most notorious and ruthless casino owner. After a series of capers out west to build their bankroll, the team heads back east. There’s little drama Players act out their part; marks fall. The big score comes off without a hitch. The two plots intersect halfway through. Annabelle arrives in D.C., thanks to an awkward development, along with a new piece of unfinished business. Seagraves and the Camel Club are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, and Annabelle Conroy is the special guest star. The merged stories reach a predictable conclusion. An obvious conflict remains unresolved for much of the way, setting up the next chapter in the saga.
A tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-446-53109-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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