Readers will root for the doorman in this enjoyable yarn.
A Manhattan doorman faces unwanted excitement in this thriller by the author of Two Nights in Lisbon (2022).
Ex-Marine Chicky Diaz has been a doorman at the Bohemia Apartments for 28 years. He is “relentlessly upbeat,” never breaks rules, never bad-mouths anyone. Everyone trusts him. He unfailingly greets each resident by name as they come and go—“Welcome home Mr. Goff” and “Let me get that bag for you Mrs. Frumm”—and seems unbothered by the financial and social chasm separating them from him. Chicky idly muses that anyone could kill or be killed around there with no one knowing it was going to happen. Nice foreshadowing, that. A widower with two daughters in college, he faces a mountain of unpaid medical bills because of his late wife’s cancer, and he owes a ton of back rent. By stark contrast, the Bohemia’s residents are all filthy rich. The building is “littered with Picassos, Chagalls, Renoirs. It’s practically a museum.” Wealthiest among them are Emily and Whit Longworth, a billionaire couple due to his business selling high-tech body armor. Before meeting Whit, Emily once cried after accidentally wasting 90 cents for an unneeded onion. And then her great beauty and sexual talent lead to matrimony and a family. Wanting to be a good person, she volunteers at a food pantry and quickly learns that it’s not cool to show up for duty in a bleeping taxi. Not wanting to be a good person, Whit finds his eye wandering to hookers, and what he does with them is scary. The quiet hatred growing between Emily and Whit is key to the plot. Meanwhile, beyond the Bohemia, there is social unrest after multiple reports of cops or white-supremacist thugs killing innocent Black men. Will there be riots? More to the point, will they affect the Bohemia’s wealthy residents? For his part, Chicky bears no one any ill will. He neither carries a weapon nor cares to and would just as soon be a passive observer. But he suffers a beatdown from a gang member named El Puño (The Fist) and is advised to apologize to the thug for having given offense. This leads to the bad guys learning what wealth lies inside those apartments. A plan develops. Will bullets fly? Will blood flow? Is the pope Catholic? Social, racial, and political commentary add color to the profanity-peppered pages.
Readers will root for the doorman in this enjoyable yarn.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374604790
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.
The 25th novel featuring Silva’s legendary protagonist.
During his intersecting careers as art restorer and Israeli spy, Gabriel Allon has tangled with Russian gangsters and al-Qaida terrorists. He has become well-acquainted with operatives in multiple security agencies and befriended a paid assassin. He has busted art thieves and created passable forgeries by Renaissance masters and abstract Modernists. This latest installment centers around his relationship with the pope and a newly discovered painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has gone missing from the Vatican. Silva’s novels tend to fall into two categories: books that reflect the politics of the day and books that don’t. His latest is one of the latter, which could be a treat for readers looking for escape, but it falls flat for a variety of reasons. Luxury has always been part of Gabriel Allon’s universe. It used to be an aspect of tradecraft, though. Allon would be wearing a very expensive suit and driving a very expensive car because he was posing as a client at a Swiss bank. Here, his wife is hosting a catered lunch for 150 of their daughter’s classmates in their apartment overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice. What once felt like a scintillating peek into the world of the obscenely wealthy now just feels…kind of obscene. Similarly, Allon goes chasing after a missing painting as a civilian—he retired from Mossad in Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022)—the same way another man his age might buy a speedboat or get hair plugs. As the story progresses, the stakes are raised, but it’s hard to forget that Allon is now a middle-aged man pursuing a dangerous hobby, rather than a spymaster leading his intrepid team to prevent a disaster that will disrupt the global order.
A rather flat entry in a generally excellent series.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780063384217
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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