Stiff prose and, despite the plentiful thriller ingredients, hard-to-believe characters.
Heavy-handed first-outing political thriller with a kitchen-sink plot.
Shortly after the ocean liner Crescent Queen, carrying a large group of American high-school students, is obliterated by a hydrogen bomb while cruising the Mediterranean, a mysterious random illness strikes worldwide, rendering its victims instantly paralyzed. Many believe that both bomb and disease are the work of terrorists, probably linked. Rabid right-wing demagogue Colin Goss, meanwhile, capitalizes on public fear to hammer the current administration and raise his own political profile—while Kennedyesque Senator Michael Campbell, son of venerable retired politico Judd Campbell, defends the president. When the vice president is felled by the mysterious “Pinocchio syndrome,” Michael’s name is floated as a possible replacement. Indeed, his telegenic wife Susan receives a series of anonymous calls forecasting her husband’s political rise. Though she loves Michael, the two are currently having sexual problems, Michael satisfying himself with discreet mistress Leslie. It’s not until the vice president’s announced successor also succumbs to the syndrome that Susan discloses the secret calls, confiding in Michael’s oldest friend and fellow Harvard alumnus Joe Kraig, now a CIA agent. Meanwhile, brilliant, driven freelance reporter Karen Embry crisscrosses the globe ferreting out the origins of the epidemic and probing its possible link to international terrorists (Osama bin Laden makes a cameo appearance in a cave) or to a domestic enemy. The reader learns that Goss is the mastermind behind Pinocchio and that Michael is his secret protégé. After another choice for veep dies, this time in a suspicious accident, Michael gets the predicted call to serve. Just as it seems that the plot is tightening with this group of players, it takes an abrupt turn with the kidnapping of Susan Campbell by an apparently left-wing entity—and, with inside info and a head start, Joe and Karen are instrumental in exposing the nefarious plot(s) and finding Susan.
Stiff prose and, despite the plentiful thriller ingredients, hard-to-believe characters.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50955-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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