One darned thing after another keeps the Pitts in peril and will keep readers turning the pages.
The latest Clive and Dirk Cussler thriller (Shadow Tyrants, 2018, etc.) has Dirk Pitt and company trying to stave off the annihilation of half the human race in a continent-hopping adventure.
In 1334 B.C.E., a boat carrying Princess Meritaten flees Egypt to escape a deadly plague. She carries a mysterious substance, the Apium of Faras. In 2020, young boys are dying in El Salvador, and scientists are murdered when they try to test the local water. Pitt’s heroics start early when a sabotaged dam bursts and he saves a woman from drowning. As his fans know, Pitt is with NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency. Later, a tanker sinks in the Detroit River, and the president orders NUMA to investigate. A NUMA diver explores the sunken wreck alone (bad idea!) and is murdered. Meanwhile, Evanna McKee, CEO of BioRem Global, is pushing her product, “microorganisms for pollution control.” Readers will quickly suss that she’s up to no good—Pitt realizes the murders must have something to do with the water samples—but the details fill out the story with near-constant action and threats. Children, all boys, are desperately ill in a Mumbai clinic. There are so many crises, Pitt’s children must help: Dirk Junior and his twin sister, Summer, dive into the croc- and criminal-infested Nile for NUMA-supported archaeological research and immediately bump into nefarious activity. Bad guys hunt for them in a burial chamber. The twins carry on the family tradition of bravery and resourcefulness, and Pitt’s wife, Congresswoman Loren Smith-Pitt, plays a smaller but significant role. The investigation leads to Loch Ness and then to a craggy ocean outcropping. “Find Meritaten,” a dying woman pleads to Pitt. “Then save us all.” The settings are colorful, the characters appealing or despicable as needed, and the action is both implausible and fun.
One darned thing after another keeps the Pitts in peril and will keep readers turning the pages.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1899-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
A humane, though frequently mawkish, look at a system where too many fall through the cracks.
An investigator who specializes in locating missing children turns her attention to a case closer to home.
After introducing Naomi Cottle to readers in The Child Finder (2017), Denfeld has brought back the tough-but-fragile searcher to explore her origins. As a girl, Naomi was held captive with her sister in a bunker in rural Oregon; one day, Naomi escaped and ran to safety and was eventually taken in by a foster mother. But Naomi was never reunited with the sister she had to leave behind, and now, 20 years on, without even the ability to remember her sister’s name, Naomi is trying to find her, starting with the street community in Portland. She’s especially drawn to one girl she meets, Celia, a 12-year-old who’s been homeless since reporting her stepfather for sexual abuse only to see him acquitted and able to move back into the family home, where Celia’s younger sister still lives. Despite the fact that Celia is living on the streets at the same time as young homeless women are being murdered and dumped into the river, she feels safer there than at home thanks to the refuge she takes in the local library and in her imagination, where she obsesses over butterflies and the freedom they represent. As she works to recover her sister, gain Celia’s trust, and uncover the serial killer, Naomi serves to remind us of the message of all of Denfeld’s work: “People stop existing once you forget them”—and no person deserves to be forgotten. If Denfeld would ease up a bit on the sentimentality, this message could shine through all the more.
A humane, though frequently mawkish, look at a system where too many fall through the cracks.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-269816-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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