A social worker is catapulted into a whirlwind of romance and danger when she meets the love of her life, superstar actor and part-time CIA operative Sam Donovan.
Author Lewis’ globe-trotting romantic action-adventure may remind some of Danielle Steele with a dose of Helen MacInnes. Beautiful Alexandra Maitland flees a love-starved, dysfunctional childhood in Cleveland and tries to put her private pain to good use as an anti-gang counselor in Los Angeles. Still, she suffers secret anxieties and crises of confidence. When her job gets cut, thanks to office politics, Alex is sent to Hawaii on an enforced vacation, where she must remain due to the threat of gang violence against her back in Los Angeles. There, she finds the neighbor of her vacation villa to be none other than Hollywood superstar Sam Donovan, who ministers to Alex intimately when she suffers life-threatening sunstroke, falling for her in the process. But two near-death experiences are not enough for this heroine. Alex’s missionary brother is seized by North Koreans and, thanks to the stalwart Sam’s government ties—he is a freelance CIA undercover agent, by the way—the couple goes to the locked-down dictatorship on a combined getting-married and rescue mission. There’s torture (gruesome indeed), submarine rides, movie-set jealousy and a further lingering threat from Max, a rogue ex-KGB operative turned rogue ex-CIA operative (whew), and his network of assassins. Fast-paced prose compacts this into far less than the doorstop of a saga it sounds, but one still wishes Lewis had taken more time to color in the outlines. The Hawaiian scenes are best for flavor, character-building and ambiance, but other jet-set locales pass with little or no adjectives wasted on them. Sinister and in-the-headlines North Korea is so utterly nondescript that the place of the lovers’ gruelingly hellish ordeal may just as well have been Syria, Pakistan, Ruritania or the Klingon Homeworld (or Cleveland again), and desultory villain Max is also pretty flat. An emphasis on the heroine’s inner growth and lambent New-Age spirituality (Alex seems to recollect herself and Sam as oft-tragic soul mates from many thwarted past lives) distinguishes this from genre competitors that put the accent on bling, celebrity name-dropping and designer brand labels.
Spiritual empowerment more so than weapons firepower (though there’s that too) is the aim of this farfetched girl-meets-boy-who-is-CIA-and-Hollywood-hero-all-in-one yarn.Pub Date: July 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1469925011
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | ESPIONAGE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
59
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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
An old-fashioned gumshoe yarn about Hollywood dreams and dead bodies.
Private investigator Aloysius Archer celebrates New Year’s Eve 1952 in LA with his gorgeous lady friend and aspiring actress Liberty Callahan. Screenwriter Eleanor Lamb shows up and offers to hire him because “someone might be trying to kill me.” “I’m fifty a day plus expenses,” he replies, but money’s no obstacle. Later, he sneaks into Lamb’s house and stumbles upon a body, then gets knocked out by an unseen assailant. Archer takes plenty of physical abuse in the story, but at least he doesn’t get a bullet between the eyes like the guy he trips over. A 30-year-old World War II combat veteran, Archer is a righteous and brave hero. Luck and grit keep him alive in both Vegas and the City of Angels, which is rife with gangsters and crooked cops. Not rich at all, his one luxury is the blood-red 1939 Delahaye he likes to drive with the top down. He’d bought it with his gambling winnings in Reno, and only a bullet hole in the windscreen post mars its perfection. Liberty loves Archer, but will she put up with the daily danger of losing him? Why doesn’t he get a safe job, maybe playing one of LA’s finest on the hit TV show Dragnet? Instead, he’s a tough and principled idealist who wants to make the world a better place. Either that or he’s simply a “pavement-pounding PI on a slow dance to maybe nowhere.” And if some goon doesn’t do him in sooner, his Lucky Strikes will probably do him in later. Baldacci paints a vivid picture of the not-so-distant era when everybody smoked, Joe McCarthy hunted commies, and Marilyn Monroe stirred men’s loins. The 1950s weren’t the fabled good old days, but they’re fodder for gritty crime stories of high ideals and lowlifes, of longing and disappointment, and all the trouble a PI can handle.
Well-done crime fiction. Baldacci nails the noir.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1977-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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