A thrilling tale loaded with bullets, bloodshed, and bodies that stars a daring veteran.
A bored cabbie tempts fate by attaching himself to a gunslinging gangster and his female operative.
Prolific British writer Dash’s (Midsummer’s Bottom, 2018, etc.) latest novel stars Eyrie Brown, a hard-drinking London taxi driver who, while lamenting his dull life, witnesses a shootout between several East End gangsters. One of the bloodied gunmen, Lewis Brue, rushes out of an alley and accepts the cabbie’s swift offer of a ride. Brue counters with an offer of his own to have Brown work covertly for him. As a former British soldier who returned from his enlistment “directionless and penniless,” Brown, abandoning his hopes to become a pro boxer, accepts Brue’s lucrative “business” proposition to do a job for 25,000 pounds. The author deftly paints his protagonist as hardscrabble and desperate for meaning in his life, but also possibly suffering from PTSD as he becomes increasingly reckless. The job appears innocent enough at first, but there’s a catch: “babysit” a young woman named Toni Curtis for a weekend, but “fight or flee” if armed henchmen arrive at his apartment looking for her. It quickly becomes clear to Brown that lewd, cocky Toni isn’t just an average woman needing special protection. Though he employs the kind of physical and tactical talent that kept him alive throughout his stint in the military, he proves no match for the cunning, gun- and knife-toting Toni after he carelessly takes her to a bare-knuckles boxing match and then a bar where trouble boils over, leaving three patrons dead. Panicked relocations only lead to more chaos and Toni’s kidnapping as Brown attempts to return the money and bow out but ends up being the one in the mob’s crosshairs. In this page-turning tale, Dash supplies plenty of rousing action and deadly gangster machinations to satisfy mob-flavored fiction fans. But it’s his knack for creating classic scene-stealing villains with names like Smurf, Spursy, and Rabbit that really deserves the applause. The author is also careful not to let things peter out as his bold protagonist finds a new lease on life. The rousing story’s rescue mission conclusion is as bloody and cinematic as its opening scenes.
A thrilling tale loaded with bullets, bloodshed, and bodies that stars a daring veteran.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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