Distrust and deceit throw soldiers and civilians into a tailspin in this gripping tale.
Chaos reigns when the Army seizes a rustic little town to stop a virus from spreading in this debut thriller.
Martin Fallon has eluded the Army soldiers hounding him for an entire month. He’d been part of a top-secret project, and now he’s infected with a virus. At least, that’s what Col. Preston Aldridge tells townsfolk in Harper’s Glen, close to where a blizzard spins Fallon’s car off the road. The desperate Fallon, after recovering at the local hospital, seeks refuge at nurse Shelly Christianson’s home. Though he initially takes Shelly hostage, Fallon may not be as crazy as he seems. He claims the Army is after him because he knows about the biological agent it’s been inhumanely testing—and all he wants to do is flee. Meanwhile, Aldridge sets up his command post at the hospital as he attempts to quarantine Harper’s Glen’s citizens. Soldiers also scour the area for Fallon, but residents object to their presence, convinced the Army has “kidnapped” the medical staff of the entire town. When the townsfolk’s resistance turns aggressive, the armed soldiers use deadly force. This only further enrages the civilians, who retaliate with guns and much worse. McBee’s novel generates intensity through a bevy of dubious characters. For example, readers don’t know who’s lying—Aldridge or Fallon—and each convincingly explains how the other is more dangerous. The cast comprises numerous players often reacting to someone’s hostility, including in action-laden scenes of the Army versus the residents. As such, the characters are generally underdeveloped, though Shelly is unquestionably sympathetic. She escaped from an abusive husband, and she won’t let Fallon make her a victim again. Despite several explosively violent turns in the story, the author’s grandest descriptions portray the cold, snowy surroundings: “Away from the plowed roads, the top-heavy military trucks slipped and fishtailed, fighting for traction on the slick muddy surface. Slowly, they plodded along.”
Distrust and deceit throw soldiers and civilians into a tailspin in this gripping tale.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63-752882-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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