by David Michael Litwack ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 27, 2019
This espionage tale has a strong sense of history but falls short on character development.
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An all-American antihero becomes entangled in Cold War geopolitics while acting as a Peace Corps emissary to North Africa in this historical thriller.
Litwack’s (The Mystery of the Big Booger, 2015) novel is presented as a stack of ephemera from Harrison “Harry” Hamblin documenting his experiences from 1967 to ’69; he left it in what is presumably newly independent Chad—although a post-postscript reveals orders by his superiors to never reveal precise locations. The reason for such secrecy becomes clear when Harry describes how the U.S. government approached him to be their “eyes and ears” in the area. His clandestine activities entangle him in a morass of local interests, colonial vestiges, and foreign superpowers. The lengthy tale, which proceeds chronologically, is highly fragmented, and its affected realism sometimes makes the plot feel almost incoherent; Litwack only manages to maintain momentum with strong dialogue and a barrage of characters. The diversity of the cast that Hamblin encounters—which include a Soviet doctor, a drunken Irish priest, a Hindu teacher, a tough restaurateur, and an enchanting princess—results in perpetual cultural collisions from which arise discussions about theology, the problem of suffering, and the limits of American exceptionalism. The variety of personalities is indeed entertaining. However, Litwack fails to meaningfully develop any character other than Harry—a former Boy Scout, a heavy drinker of brown liquors, an atheist, and a womanizer who considers himself romantic. Hamblin feels that he’s “living the life of Livingston—or Conrad—or Kurtz—or any other of the European figures of this heart of darkness”; at the same time, he’s also obsessed with distinguishing himself from other “Nasarah”—a slur generally deployed to denote Europeans—as he embarks on several romantic trysts, visits a leper colony, sends coded messages in the middle of the night, rides into rebel camps, survives debilitating illness, and organizes a high-stakes horse race, all while embedding himself deeper in the region. As tensions bubble over, he and his colleagues attempt a daring escape, with mixed results.
This espionage tale has a strong sense of history but falls short on character development.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6431-9
Page Count: 376
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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