A wonderfully offbeat caper with smart characters wielding guns and razor-sharp dialogue.
In Wilsher’s debut crime novel, a small-time thief and his estranged daughter go on the run from mobsters and cops who are after his latest haul.
Charlie McCoy knows that helping his friend Moe Baker burglarize mob boss Big Phil Adonis is a bad idea. But he owes loan-sharking meth dealer Goran Ivanov $20,000, and he doesn’t want him to break his other hand. However, the cash in Adonis’ safe isn’t enough to cover his debt; even worse, it turns out that Moe intends to set Charlie up. Charlie gets away with the loot, which includes a stack of CDs filled with incriminating “accounting information” that the FBI wants. Soon, Adonis’ son, Phil Jr., and his thugs are hot on Charlie’s trail, and the police aren’t far behind. The gangsters leave dead bodies in their wake, but the cops attribute the murders to Charlie. Joining the pursuit is a crooked FBI agent, who’s certain that a CD or two could incriminate him if they got into the cops’ hands. Also, it’s Charlie’s week with his 13-year-old daughter, Amy, and his ex-wife, Carol, drops her off mere minutes before mobsters come knocking. Wilsher’s dynamic story has some shades of Elmore Leonard’s work, presenting a world in which good and bad guys are seemingly interchangeable. Charlie, for example, is the hero of the story, but he’s also a criminal and not an ideal father, while the aforementioned federal agent uses his ill-gotten money primarily to care for a bedridden relative. These and other characters are all top-notch, although the relationship between father and daughter is the strongest. Amy comes off as a believable teenager who bombards her dad with questions and is snarky at all the right moments.
A wonderfully offbeat caper with smart characters wielding guns and razor-sharp dialogue.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 378
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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