Freemantle hits pay dirt as the UN Secretariat Tower is hit by a missile that’s shoulder-launched from the East River and loaded with sarin and anthrax.
The plot brings back alcoholic FBI investigator William Cowley, head of the Bureau’s Russian Desk, and puts him in harness again with Dimitri Danilov, now head of Moscow’s Organized Crime Bureau. Danilov worked with Cowley to bring down villains in 1993’s The Button Man and 1995’s No Time for Heroes, and, while he’s now relatively sober, he still measures his Scotches with care. The missile lies unexploded in the Chinese level of the Secretariat building (the structure is an international territory), but, exploded or not, it has raised havoc, killed five people, and caused Manhattan to be evacuated (54 dead in the big rush outta town). Some Freemantle New Yorkers, thinking themselves at the end of the world—as in On the Beach—loot stores or raid the Tavern on the Green for a drunken dance of death in Central Park. When Cowley and a team of bomb disposal experts recover the warhead, they identify it as made from a Russian biological warfare plant in Gorki. Obviously, the Russians didn’t mail it. The bomb was stolen from the Russian plant—and how many more do The Watchmen, the murderous US terrorists who financed this operation, have, and what do they plan to do with them? Thinly drawn info-characters feed the story while Cowley is hospitalized (a booby-trapped boat explodes) and Danilov finds his wife in bed with another man. Then, while explosives proliferate around the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, a hacker message on FBI computers reveals that The Watchmen think that Russia is our enemy. Soon Cowley is off to Gorki with Danilov, tracking lost warheads, then in Chicago pursuing the General of The Watchmen.
Painstaking detail within a lively plot, all in Freemantle’s familiar formula.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-24274-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
Categories: THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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