Diverting escapist entertainment about a valuable hostage that sets up the last installment of a trilogy.
An anti-terrorist organization leaps into action when its nemesis kidnaps the president of the United States in this sequel.
Abraham Lincoln is credited with the maxim “People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like.” This may sound like faint praise, but readers of the first InterOps adventure should totally get it. In this second installment, Lambert (For the Innocent, 2014) has amped up the action set pieces, the body count, and the page count (it’s more than twice as long as its predecessor). InterOps is an elite, covert anti-terrorist squad. In a cold opening akin to the prologues in James Bond films, two ex–Drug Enforcement Administration agents, now “freelance exterminators,” take violent revenge against associates of a drug cartel responsible for slaughtering the family of one of the partners. With that nasty bit of score-settling concluded, Lambert gets down to business: Alexander Shaitan is the globe’s deadliest terrorist, and his “evil shadow would again darken the world’s horizon.” While InterOps did “irreparable damage” to Shaitan’s International Organization for Terrorist Aggression, that operation just made him mad. In a daring raid on an airborne Air Force One, he kidnaps the commander in chief and slaughters everyone else on board (save the media), including, shockingly, the first lady. In exchange for the president, he demands that InterOps leader Erik Rächer be brought to him. Delta Force team leader Arturo Castillo is charged with finding Rächer, who is initially not keen on the swap. He has a change of heart when Shaitan kidnaps his daughter. Lambert is still not a deft writer: “It was the kind of moon reputed to cause an imbalance in some people. As if to prove that theory, there were more imbalanced people out on the loose than usual.” The author’s tough-guy banter, too, is rife with B-movie clichés. When one of the ex–DEA agents orders a drug criminal’s house to be set afire, his partner replies, “I do love a good cookout.” But gun fetishists should appreciate Lambert’s prodigious product placement, from a “Desert Eagle .50AE semiautomatic pistol with its six-inch barrel” to the “Belgian-made Fabrique Nationale FNC 5.56 mm rifle.” This InterOps thriller turns out to be a guilty pleasure.
Diverting escapist entertainment about a valuable hostage that sets up the last installment of a trilogy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 16, 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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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