This recurring gumshoe earns his ongoing series, even if he takes a back seat to the baddie this time around.
Colorado private investigator Reece Culver, vacationing in Britain, looks into the case of an assassin targeting people linked to a London corporation in this thriller.
Reece and retired cop pal Haisley Averton are tourists in Scotland just for the trout fishing. But when they narrowly avoid getting in the path of a sniper’s bullet, Reece takes it personally and starts his own investigation. The assassin’s target was reporter Thomas Billington, who’d been writing an investigative piece on Karl Rhodes, chief of strategy at London’s Draecon International. The company has just amped up its security, suspecting that someone hacked Rhodes’ home and office computers. Reece finds his way to the home of Rhodes’ estranged wife, Marie—as well as her bed—while Haisley, scouring Billington’s laptop, discovers a possible connection between Draecon and experimental military aircraft. At the same time, Julian Cross, an assassin on retainer, works for a client with an apparent hit list. When it’s fairly obvious that Rhodes is Julian’s next target, Reece takes Rhodes, Marie, and Rhodes’ mistress, Candice, to hide out in Colorado. Julian tracks them to the United States, however, and goes gunning for the businessman—or maybe all four. The story culminates in a kidnapping, what may very well be an attempt to draw out Reece. The novel, a solid thriller, delivers an assassin pursuing targets everywhere from America to Anguilla in the Caribbean. There’s a bit of mystery, though it’s all but vanished before the story’s halfway point when Koepke (Damage, 2015, etc.) resolves the biggest conundrum—who hired Julian? Reece is a sufficient protagonist, a better action hero than detective. Nevertheless, he’s nearly surpassed by the far more engaging Julian, a nameless killer to most of the other characters. His sniping skills are exceptional even if he’s not the most efficient assassin, trying to shoot someone, for example, from a speeding ATV. It’s Julian’s seemingly mundane behavior that turns him into an everyday man; it’s fascinating when he checks the sights of his Sig Sauer in his apartment while lasagna bakes in the oven.
This recurring gumshoe earns his ongoing series, even if he takes a back seat to the baddie this time around.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9915824-3-3
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Writers Cabin Press, Ltd.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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