In Leitner’s debut novel, a retired assassin from a shadowy black-ops agency recalls his life, loves, losses and kills as he’s dragged back into intrigue and danger.
Leitner says that this story is based on “a friend”; readers, however, may be reminded of game-show producer Chuck Barris and his confabulated memoirs—Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Bad Grass Never Dies—claiming that, while hosting The Dating Game and The Gong Show, he led a secret life as a globetrotting CIA hit man. When captive first-person protagonist David is tormented and teased by a dominatrix interrogator in Budapest, his memories carry readers back to his mother’s early death and his war-veteran dad’s mentoring. David’s younger days are marked by heavy drug use and torrid love affairs, beginning with the precociously brilliant 15-year-old’s sexual indoctrination by a troubled research chemist who later summons David to witness her suicide. Sex and drugs remain a fixture throughout his college years, descriptions of which feature a haunting girl-who-got-away “with a smile that could guide ships safely around rocky shores.” At this point, some readers may start to wonder when the cloak-and-dagger stuff will kick off. When it does, David is blackmailed and threatened with his past indiscretions until he agrees to work for the dreaded “Department R” as a sleeper assassin. Physically nondescript but lethal when it counts, David is periodically activated to go abroad and kill alleged enemies—many of them exotic women he first beds, then doses with a painless but fatal injection. David considers this method chivalrous or, at the very least, making the best of things. Leitner’s narrative voice sometimes touches but never quite crosses the line into camp or satire. The lurid wet work and pillow talk, as well as the based-on-a-true-story gimmick, will help maintain readers’ interest in what otherwise may seem like a pulpy mimicry of Ian Fleming’s kinkier outtakes. Readers’ mission, should they choose to accept it, is to wonder what’s real and what’s braggadocio in this regret-tinged stew of sex, love, murder and espionage.
Pub Date: June 24, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Smashwords
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
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
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
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