An intelligent, eventful crime story, coupled with complex political drama.
Stout (Night of the Devil, 2016, etc.) offers a thriller that dramatizes potential pitfalls of the United States’ electoral college system.
In 2028, the two main presidential candidates—Republican Robert Sinclair, the governor of Texas, and Ramon Alvarez, a Democrat from California—have vastly different ideological bearings. Also, the stakes are high, as Justice Herman Lodge, a swing vote on the Supreme Court, is poised to retire. Although Alvarez dominates the popular vote, the electoral vote contest is razor-thin and could hinge on Ohio. If Sinclair manages to win that state, the race could tie, sending the decision to the House of Representatives. Billionaire Malcolm Varick tries to fix the race by having Ohio Democratic electors killed and replaced with faithless ones. He also tries to eliminate a young law clerk who’s rumored to wield considerable influence over Justice Lodge. When Rashad Bennett, a top Democratic political operative, and his wife, Laura, are targeted, retired police officer Jim Blades gets involved, as he knows Laura personally from an old case. FBI agent Jerome Hubbard asks Blades to assist in the investigation. One of the assassins, Steven West, is a deeply troubled man who becomes a liability to Varick, so his security chief decides to eliminate him; meanwhile, Blades is hot on West’s trail. Stout ambitiously braids together several dramatic plot threads, involving murder, political intrigue, and the possibility of constitutional crisis, into a seamless whole. There’s no shortage of legalese—indeed, the main plotline hinges on a precise understanding of the electoral college system’s obscure structure—but Stout cleverly lets TV talking heads explain the constitutional and political details, with the occasional assist from a barroom lawyer. This is a timely book, given the obvious parallels to today’s contentious political environment, but Stout avoids simple partisanship or overwrought proselytizing. This is first and foremost a thriller, and as such, it doesn’t disappoint.
An intelligent, eventful crime story, coupled with complex political drama.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 359
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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