Loose lips sink careers in this barn-burning first novel about a Supreme Court clerk who runs his mouth to a disastrously ill-chosen confidant. The Solicitor General is often called the Court's tenth justice, but don't tell that to the Court's 18 clerks, who are convinced the world revolves around them. So it's not surprising that Justice Mason Hollis's clerk Ben Addison, who knows the results of all the Court's decisions long before they're announced, mentions one of them to Rick Fagen, one of Hollis's old clerks. Alas, Rick is an imposter who never clerked for Hollis, but who's just wormed his way into Ben's confidence to get a tip that will allow him to make millions on the insider info. Worse, Rick seems to know everything about Ben's puny efforts to find out who he really is. Does he have an in with Ben's fellow-clerk Lisa Schulman? Or could he be getting the skinny from one of Ben's roommates—senatorial assistant William Oberman, State staffer Nathan Hollister, or Washington Herald reporter Eric Stroman—all of them childhood friends? Ben determines to nail Rick for his perfidy, but Rick simply responds by stepping up the pressure, demanding further tipoffs on sensitive cases and threatening to reveal Ben's involvement to the U.S. Marshals, who are already suspicious on account of a news story Eric filed on possible Court leaks. The more Rick's noose tightens, the more suspicious and shrill Ben grows about his old friends, whose fear of their bosses and parents and whose unfailingly juvenile dialogue (``Drop it'' and ``He's dead'' are Ben's stock responses to every new threat) suggest the Washington branch of St. Elmo's Fire. Meltzer spins a mean paranoid fantasy that'll have you turning pages in a frenzy to learn whether Ben and his equally strung-out buddies ever grow up. (Literary Guild super release; film rights to Fox 2000; author tour)
Pub Date: May 14, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15089-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
11
GET IT
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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Two defrocked Secret Service Agents investigate the assassination of one presidential candidate and the kidnapping of another.
Baldacci (The Christmas Train, 2002, etc.) sets out with two plot strands. The first begins when something distracts Secret Service Agent Sean King and during that “split second,” presidential candidate Clyde Ritter is shot dead. King takes out the killer, but that’s not enough to save his reputation with the Secret Service. He retires and goes on to do often tedious but nonetheless always lucrative work (much like a legal thriller such as this) at a law practice. Plot two begins eight years later when another Secret Service Agent, Michelle Maxwell, lets presidential candidate John Bruno out of her sight for a few minutes at a wake for one of his close associates. He goes missing. Now Maxwell, too, gets in dutch with the SS. Though separated by time, the cases are similar and leave several questions unanswered. What distracted King at the rally? Bruno had claimed his friend’s widow called him to the funeral home. The widow (one of the few characters here to have any life) says she never called Bruno. Who set him up? Who did a chambermaid at Ritter’s hotel blackmail? And who is the man in the Buick shadowing King’s and Maxwell’s every move? King is a handsome, rich divorce, Maxwell an attractive marathon runner. Will they join forces and find each other kind of, well, appealing? But of course. The two former agents traverse the countryside, spinning endless hypotheses before the onset, at last, of a jerrybuilt conclusion that begs credibility and offers few surprises.
Assembly-line legal thriller: flat characters, lame scene-setting, and short but somehow interminable action: a lifeless concoction.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53089-1
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Categories: THRILLER
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