Egleton (Cry Havoc, 2003, etc.) has always been able to make quiet heroism engrossing. In Ashby, close kin to le Carré’s...
Predating superagent Peter Ashton & Co., an entertaining tale by the veteran thrillmeister—first published in 1974 in England—deals with a quixotic attempt to shorten WWII.
October 1944: though the plot to blow up Hitler has fizzled, it’s had its ramifications. One involves Major-General Paul Heinrich Gerhardt, plotter, who escapes to England with an adjunctive plan to promote. His idea is to blow up a Hitler henchman so loftily placed that the German high command will be left in disarray. Kill Martin Bormann, Gerhardt maintains to a series of British debriefers, and you strike a crippling blow at the diminishing coterie of Nazi hawks. Few take him seriously, and most regard him as an opportunist, squirming to earn points toward redemption if ever war-criminal courts should be convened. Enter acting Lieutenant Colonel Michael Ashby, another not taken seriously—neither by his colleagues, his wife, nor, for that matter, himself. But Gerhardt and Ashby do take each other seriously, and thus Force 272 is born. In a remote Welsh village, the nucleus of a team goes into training. Among those recruited are six ill-assorted Germans, a Brit who hates all Germans, and an accidental American—that is, a US Army officer whose plans did not include becoming part of the mission until he sort of stumbled into it. Still, Ashby refuses to contemplate failure as a possibility. Having spent most of his life being underrated, Ashby is now, in his self-effacing way, consumed with ambition. They will, he tells his men, successfully sneak into Germany. They will receive promised help from German co-conspirators. And they will, on schedule, assassinate Martin Bormann. Little by little, and against their better judgment, they convert to believers.
Egleton (Cry Havoc, 2003, etc.) has always been able to make quiet heroism engrossing. In Ashby, close kin to le Carré’s Smiley, we see an early and interesting example.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7278-6131-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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