Ex-spooks play a murderous game in Freemantle’s suspenseful latest (Dead End, 2005, etc.).
His CIA colleagues gave Jack Mason a high rating. He was a spook’s spook—smart, intuitive, relentless. Too bad he worked for the wrong side. For a long time, he was, as they say, embedded, a double agent working with Colonel Dimitri Sobell of the KGB. Enter that most unexpected of intruders, Cupid. The colonel falls deeply in love—with Jack Mason’s disenchanted wife. Soon, Moscow will be calling Sobell home, and if he’s to remain with Ann, he has no choice but to defect. In addition, he brings Mason in from the cold the hard way, ratting him out to the CIA. Mason draws 20 years but gets it cut to 15, a period he devotes in large measure to imagining revenge fantasies. Meanwhile, Dimitri becomes Daniel Slater and, with Ann and their 14-year-old son, disappears into the Witness Protection Program. Now he operates a thriving industrial security business and Mrs. Slater an up-and-coming art gallery. Life is good—until word reaches them of Mason’s parole. Though shaken at first by the news, Slater recovers quickly, convinced that the Witness Protection camouflage is impenetrable, even by a spy as accomplished as Mason. Ann, however, panics. Even more than Slater, she appreciates Mason’s twisted cleverness, his obsessiveness, his capacity for hatred—all fed by 15 years of contemplating his betrayal. The payback he has so long envisioned is to be artful, meticulously designed and exquisitely slow: “Only after inflicting every conceivable hurt and loss would he finally kill Sobell.” And so it begins, the oh-so-deadly game of One Survivor.
Though the oeuvre now numbers in the 30s, this bleak, chilling entry demonstrates well that the veteran thrillermeister can still make a reader gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7278-6446-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
77
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A serial killer with a sense of history is the baddie in this latest from Baldacci, one of the reigning kings of potboilers (Split Second, 2003, etc.).
He kills, he leaves clues, he flatters through imitation: Son of Sam, the San Francisco Zodiac killer, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gracy, and so on down a sanguinary list of accredited members of the Monsters’ Hall of Fame. Suddenly, the landscape of poor little Wrightsburg, Virginia, is littered with corpses, and ex-Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have their hands full. That’s because bewildered, beleaguered Chief of Police Todd Williams has turned to the newly minted private investigating firm of King and Maxwell for desperately needed (unofficial) help. Even these ratiocinative wizards, however, admit to puzzlement. “But I'm not getting this,” says Michelle. “Why commit murders in similar styles to past killers as a copycat would and then write letters making it clear you’re not them?” Excellent question, and it goes pretty much unanswered. Never mind—enter the battling Battles, a family with the requisite number of sins and secrets to qualify fully as hot southern Gothic and to prop up a plot in need. Bobby Battles, the patriarch, is bedridden, but Remmy, his wife, is one lively mischief-making steel magnolia. She’s brought breaking-and-entering charges against decent local handyman Junior Deaver, who as a result languishes in the county jail. Convinced of his innocence, Junior’s lawyer hires King & Maxwell to sniff around for exculpatory evidence. Well, will the two plot streams flow together? You betcha. Will the copycat-serial-killer at one point decide that King and Maxwell are just too clever to live? Inevitably. And when at last that CCSK’s identity is revealed and his crimes explained (talkily and tediously), will readers be satisfied? Only the charitable among them.
Lame but, like its predecessors, bound for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53108-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Categories: THRILLER
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