A diverting tale of an exciting, harrowing quest for a centuries-old fortune.
In Leng’s thriller, the search for long-hidden gold puts treasure hunters in unexpected peril.
Jack Sullivan makes money leading private tours in Pennsylvania. If he could, he would devote all his time to his obsession: searching for Major General Edward Braddock’s legendary buried gold. (During the 18th-century French and Indian War, the British officer ordered Captain Thomas Clarke to stash the army’s payroll.) In the present day, a construction crew in Maryland unearths a wooden barrel containing, among other things, Clarke’s journal. Thanks to Jack’s connection to Emma Wilson (she’s his ex-fiancee), the assistant director and curator at the Museum of American History, he gets first crack at the document. Clarke left at least one coded message that points Jack to a marker, one of several that may ultimately lead to Braddock’s treasure. Of course, Jack can’t do this alone, and his best friend Steve Johnson (who saved his life when the two were in the Navy) joins him on the mission. Surprisingly, Emma lends a hand as well, despite Jack’s obsessive hunt for the gold being the reason she broke off their engagement. They debate how much to tell others—even potential allies, like the descendant of a French officer tied to Clarke and the director of a local Maryland museum. Jack and his friends aren’t the only ones looking; they repeatedly spot a hooded individual and the same pickup truck in their vicinity. Things quickly escalate as a break-in, an act of vandalism, and an assault make abundantly clear the lengths to which their unknown rivals are willing to go.
Leng layers his first foray into fiction with generous amounts of American history. The plot intermittently bounces between different times, portraying events from the Battle of Fort Duquesne to Clarke and fellow soldiers braving such hazardous terrain as a raging river to hide the payroll and markers. While Braddock appears in some scenes, the true focus is on Clarke, who showcases cleverness and tenacity as both a leader and an officer following orders. The present-day cast hews to a steady routine of painstaking searches and lighthearted downtime. The latter allows for Steve to find romance as well as the possibility of Jack and Emma reigniting their old flame (“Although she believed they were friends now, some uncertainty was in her mind. They moved to the beat of the music, and she lost herself in the moment. He whispered, ‘You’re still the best dance partner I’ve had’”). Some of the humor falls flat (usually when someone trying to lighten the mood), but the quips and banter between the friends conveys a welcome kinship. Readers expecting the treasure hunters to crack increasingly baffling codes may be disappointed, as the bulk of the story consists of them moving from place to place looking for markers. Nevertheless, the tension weighs heavily in a search that involves scuba diving to underwater caverns and squeezing into cramped spaces. The final act further amplifies the danger and throws in a few surprises as the novel winds down.
A diverting tale of an exciting, harrowing quest for a centuries-old fortune.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9798335212397
Page Count: 424
Publisher: White Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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