A topical adventure that will please fans of military and technological intrigue.
A taught tech-thriller that chronicles the romantic bonding of two heroes and their struggle to expose a rogue U.S. Army Special Forces unit.
At the center of this pleasingly complicated Clancy-esque yarn—though one skeptical of the military industrial complex—is the shadowy School of the Americas. This institution of higher learning—renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001—was for the training of Latin American intelligence, military and police forces, run quietly by the U.S. Department of Defense until the stories of its alumni’s post-graduate genocide came to light in the late ’90s. In this ingenious little novel, the school is also a place where special operations forces are trained in highly advanced, almost virtual, sessions; if caught during an exercise in escape, cadets are taken to an ersatz prison where the beatings are real. It’s a fascinating setting, but, blessedly, this book has as much heart and head as guts and glory. Sandra Tellan, the widow of a former commander of a special unit called Hazmat, receives a rude awakening when her computer spouts out strange code. She informs the military of the incident, and from there, the story does not let up. Sandra is being watched, and the Hazmat team is on a seemingly warrantless, capricious killing spree through the Chicago area. She turns to college professor Charlie Hart—the chemistry between the two is authentic and immediate—whose work on urban planning has become a kind of guide map for the marauding killers. However, Sandra and Charlie have the Necros Tracker, a program written by her husband that allows them to track the murders using data from law enforcement agencies. How exactly this all fits together is only part of the novel’s fun, and the denouement does not disappoint. Harris’ prose is lively and unpretentious, yet generous enough to create spaces for the imagination without eschewing the pleasurable detail and emotions in the interest of racing to the next page. The literate descriptions of scenery and atmosphere and the knowledgeable weaving of historic fact with clever, relevant fiction make the novel’s romantic and relevant conclusion well worth the journey.
A topical adventure that will please fans of military and technological intrigue.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1449056698
Page Count: 220
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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