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
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of...
Hoover’s (November 9, 2015, etc.) latest tackles the difficult subject of domestic violence with romantic tenderness and emotional heft.
At first glance, the couple is edgy but cute: Lily Bloom runs a flower shop for people who hate flowers; Ryle Kincaid is a surgeon who says he never wants to get married or have kids. They meet on a rooftop in Boston on the night Ryle loses a patient and Lily attends her abusive father’s funeral. The provocative opening takes a dark turn when Lily receives a warning about Ryle’s intentions from his sister, who becomes Lily’s employee and close friend. Lily swears she’ll never end up in another abusive home, but when Ryle starts to show all the same warning signs that her mother ignored, Lily learns just how hard it is to say goodbye. When Ryle is not in the throes of a jealous rage, his redeeming qualities return, and Lily can justify his behavior: “I think we needed what happened on the stairwell to happen so that I would know his past and we’d be able to work on it together,” she tells herself. Lily marries Ryle hoping the good will outweigh the bad, and the mother-daughter dynamics evolve beautifully as Lily reflects on her childhood with fresh eyes. Diary entries fancifully addressed to TV host Ellen DeGeneres serve as flashbacks to Lily’s teenage years, when she met her first love, Atlas Corrigan, a homeless boy she found squatting in a neighbor’s house. When Atlas turns up in Boston, now a successful chef, he begs Lily to leave Ryle. Despite the better option right in front of her, an unexpected complication forces Lily to cut ties with Atlas, confront Ryle, and try to end the cycle of abuse before it’s too late. The relationships are portrayed with compassion and honesty, and the author’s note at the end that explains Hoover’s personal connection to the subject matter is a must-read.
Packed with riveting drama and painful truths, this book powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse—and the strength of the survivors.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1036-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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