Frank’s legal wiles give him sound instincts, but his determination makes him a worthy gumshoe.
In the second of Carson’s (RVR, 2010) McManus Thrillers series, the attorney’s two most recent cases have something in common—an illegal aliens/drugs smuggling scheme.
Frank, Jack McManus' brother, is a personal injury lawyer maintaining a low profile in Palmdale, California. His pal Shocker Schwartz, bartender and fellow claims adjuster back in the day, steers an injury case his way in the form of Roland “Rolly the Clown” Waxman, run down by a Hummer. Frank has concurrently lined up a possible sexual harassment suit: Tanya Tookers lost her job at an airplane boneyard for not succumbing to boss Mushti Mushtiffe’s unambiguous advances. Shocker and Frank track the Hummer to Evangalina Fortescue, vice president of a casket-manufacturing company, and the men are both shocked when further surveillance reveals a late-night meeting between Evangalina and Mushti. This apparent link between Frank’s cases is subsequently confirmed: Evangalina and Mushti show up to their individual depositions with the same lawyer. Frank suspects that the two are part of a devious plot to transport people and drugs in caskets. He has also spotted a red pickup truck constantly shadowing him. His predicament suddenly becomes more dire when people tied to the cases vanish and others turn up dead. Jorge Rivera, who’s behind the nefarious operation, thinks Frank knows too much and targets him for murder. This novel offers noticeably fewer courtroom scenes than RVR, but readers shouldn’t mind. They’ll be charmed by Frank and Shocker as amateur detectives; Shocker may hate surveillance but he’s exceptionally good at it, and when a lead points Frank to Miami, he follows it without hesitation. Carson doesn’t delve too deeply into Jorge’s smuggling business, but he establishes Jorge as the main villain who makes even his own employees nervous. The plot is more exhilarating than the preceding book’s, particularly because the protagonist is so often in danger. Frank has an unnerving encounter with Jorge in Miami, while someone holds Frank’s truck driver girlfriend, Christine Pulaski, at gunpoint. There aren’t many surprises regarding Frank’s investigation, with Jorge’s perspective giving readers an antagonist so early. But Carson still manages twists, including at least one unexpected (and brutal) murder.
Frank’s legal wiles give him sound instincts, but his determination makes him a worthy gumshoe.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 150
Publisher: KaleBoy Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
