This book won’t change lives or linger long in the memory, but for pure entertainment purposes, it’s hard to beat Cade and...
Farnsworth (Blood Oath, 2010) turns in another fast-paced thriller with a supernatural flair in the second installment of his Nathaniel Cade series.
Cade isn’t the garden-variety bite-’em-in-the-neck sort of vampire: He’s been around for decades in the service of the U.S. government. More particularly, Cade is sworn to protect the president of the United States, and sometimes that gets a little hairy. Only a select few know about Cade and all of the other things that go bump in the night. In fact, the government’s done a bang-up job of keeping Cade and the constant incursions from the Other Side from public knowledge. Zach Barrows, Cade’s handler, is one who sometimes wishes he didn’t know what evil lurks around every corner, particularly when that evil is intent on killing him and the rest of mankind. Although inoculated against zombies and taught to handle himself in a fight, Zach really would just rather have a quiet night and a little recreational sex. No such luck, though. Cade has unearthed a strange surge of creatures that Zach has dubbed the “snakeheads.” Reptilian in looks, the strong, scaly things have an appetite for human flesh and a strength and resilience that make them hard to bring down in a fair fight. Now it looks like the snakeheads may be multiplying in numbers that even Cade, with his enormous capacity to outwit and overpower the creatures, may not be able to stop. Farnsworth leans heavily on every conspiracy theory ever uttered out loud, and explains most of it by blaming it on the CIA and a bad seed civilian company, both of which are almost comically nasty. And he veers into silliness-quite often, with villains that lack only a Snidely Whiplash mustache to paint the full picture. He makes up for the lack of depth in his characters and plot with some crackerjack action scenes that carry the story.
This book won’t change lives or linger long in the memory, but for pure entertainment purposes, it’s hard to beat Cade and company riding to the rescue.Pub Date: April 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15739-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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