A haunting historical backdrop provides a base for a triad of curious but irresistible characters.
Three boys, products of a Nazi geneticist’s experiment, break free from their confines, with one of them becoming a proficient killer, in the second of Ernst’s (Inhumanum, 2016) thriller series.
In the tunnels underneath Berlin, Dr. Wolfgang Bähr spends his post–World War II days experimenting with parthenogenesis in mammals. Years later, the scientist locks away twins, whom he eventually names Ryker and Rickard, and an “exquisite” third boy, The One Who Was Different. It’s not surprising that the three, advanced in numerous ways, most notably intelligence, manage to escape their prison. Outside the tunnels is a library, where they befriend librarian Fräulein Gitte and amass a wealth of information from books. Later discovering a surgical amphitheater, Ryker and Rickard start bringing their brother pedophiliac priests, hoping he can perhaps find a flaw in the men’s brains. The Different One ultimately adopts the name Osgar and decides to hunt other pedophiles and Nazi war criminals, not so much for justice as for the simple fact that he enjoys killing. Osgar’s perfectly suited to be an assassin, a job he’s known for by the early 1990s. It’s also the reason he’s a threat to toxicologist Henna Maxwell, targeted by a lobbyist out for revenge. Fortunately, Henna’s got vigilante Bonn Maddox on her side and a couple of unlikely allies. The brothers, who appeared in the author’s previous novel, take the reins for this enthralling story, their gradual evolution a highlight. Ryker and Rickard, for example, are the strong ones, sporting anatomical features that are frankly mesmerizing—including two sets of eyelids, à la reptiles. Osgar initially seems meek, the pale, weaker brother, but he turns out to be the most deadly and formidable. It’s a bit disappointing that the brothers share the spotlight with returning protagonists Henna and Bonn in the second half. Ernst sets an impressive pace in the final act, but he accomplishes this by not using pages to re-establish characters; readers will need to be familiar with the series’ first installment. There are shocks and a gratifying ending, with gaps in the brothers’ timeline leaving room for perhaps another book centering on the reptilian Germans.
A haunting historical backdrop provides a base for a triad of curious but irresistible characters.Pub Date: July 4, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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