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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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