The character-driven, behind-the-scenes investigative drama of a particularly good plane-themed episode of CSI, coupled with...
A National Transportation Safety Board “Go-Team” races to figure out what brought an airliner down in Haynes’s debut thriller.
Pathologist and former NTSB investigator Leonard “Tommy” Tomzak happened to be in Portland for a conference when news of a nearby plane crash broke. Tommy had recently left the NTSB in shame after his protracted investigation of a crash in Kentucky went nowhere. All the same, Tommy heads to the crash site to babysit the scene until the investigators—the “Go Team”—can assemble. At the insistence of Susan Tanaka, an NTSB senior incident investigator who thought the Kentucky crash was unsolvable, Tommy reluctantly takes the job of Investigator in Charge. As the rest of the team arrives—including cocky, well-dressed engine specialist Peter Kim, athletic, quirky audio expert Kiki Duvall, and John Roby, the wisecracking English bomb specialist—some members are thrilled to be working under Tommy, while others don’t think he should be anywhere near a crash investigation, let alone in charge of one. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Daria Gibron, a former Mossad agent who now does occasional work for the FBI, almost accidentally infiltrates a group of fanatical Ulster Loyalists who seem to have had something to do with the crash. She realizes that the terrorists are planning an even bigger follow-up, but she can’t get away long enough to send a warning to her minder in the bureau. So the Go Team is working against the clock even more than they realize. To make matters worse, the man who engineered the disaster happens to be one of their own—an awkward software engineer working for the company that made the so-called “black box,” who surreptitiously wrote code into his company’s data recorders that allows him to drop planes out of the sky practically at will. This is a thriller that lands a rare and satisfying hat trick: The action sequences hit hard, the characters are idiosyncratic while still feeling like real people, and the “snappy” dialogue actually snaps.
The character-driven, behind-the-scenes investigative drama of a particularly good plane-themed episode of CSI, coupled with the beats, timing and grand-scale action of a summer blockbuster.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59988-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
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
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