Comic-strip specialist Cussler (Raise the Titanic!) returns with as implausible a tale as he can invent, again featuring death-proof underwater-recovery mariner Dirk Pitt. An antique blimp carrying multimillionaire publisher Raymond LeBaron is searching for the US Navy collier Cyclops, which went down in the Caribbean in 1918, when the blimp loses radio contact with land and disappears for 10 days. It reappears, manned by dessicated dead men, floating toward the Sonesta Hotel in Key Biscayne. Pitt, who is enjoying himself sailboarding, spots the colossus and snags a line from it, just averting a tragedy. Later, Mrs. LeBaron refuses to identify one of the dead, who is wearing her husband's clothes and jewelry, as LeBaron. As it happens, the three substitute corpses are Soviet cosmonauts whose bodies had been recovered and frozen a year ago. By whom? Meanwhile, the President is buttonholed by a caddy on a golf course who pretends to be carrying a bomb and reveals a fantastic private enterprise scheme which placed a US team on the moon six years ago and is now about to return its men to earth and go public. But the Russians are also establishing their own team on the moon! What is the connection between Cyclops and the moon colony? Only that LeBaron is among the rich founders of the colony, and had hoped to recover from the collier a secret treasure: a six-foot solid gold goddess with a 30-pound emerald for a head and giant ruby in her breast, stolen from a wealthy native tribe. But when Pitt locates and boards the sunken ship, the statue is missing. Also, the Russians have a ship loaded to the gills with explosive ammonium nitrate in Havana harbor and plan to blow up Havana and Castro in a tremendous fireball. Castro now wishes to establish peace with Washington. Can Pitt save Havana? As a matter of fact, he doesn't altogether and is himself caught up in the fireball. But he's immortal, right? Nicely paced junk, expertly set in motion for ultraescapists who like hollow noises between their ears.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1985
ISBN: 1451621027
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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