A brisk but assertive tale, with plenty of spies, killers, and double-crossings to satiate readers.
In Hosmer’s debut thriller, American and Canadian law enforcement agents search for a physicist whose disappearance may be related to a weapons system he’s developing.
Lincoln Hawthorne is looking forward to a December weekend getaway at his grandfather Robert’s camp in New York. Sadly, after he arrives, he finds Robert dead with a pitchfork in his chest. Cops arrive at the scene, but the FBI quickly jumps on the case as well, as Robert was working for the U.S. Navy on a joint U.S.–Canada project involving a weapon of some sort. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that the body isn’t Robert’s at all but that of a different man wearing a latex mask. Security photos from the Naval Surface Warfare Center show the same person posing as Robert days ago, accompanied by a driver whom authorities identify as Aleksandr Yeschenko. The feds are soon convinced that Russians have taken the still-living Robert across the border into Canada. It turns out that they abducted the physicist in a ploy to trade him for the project prototype, which Canadian intelligence agent Mathieu Parise possesses. Both the U.S. and Canadian intelligence communities suspect that a mole in their midst is aiding the Russians, but the conspiracy actually goes much deeper than that. Hosmer’s short novel doesn’t dawdle, as Lincoln finds the corpse almost immediately, and it soon introduces a copious amount of characters, including officers from Canada, New York, and Virginia (Robert’s home state). The players occasionally lack distinctive personalities, but there’s definitely nuance in Lincoln’s budding relationship with FBI agent Allison Thiel. They share a bed but also go undercover together, with Allison posing as Lincoln’s wife during a precarious hostage exchange. Hosmer also gives the espionage some density; villains have varying motives, and Robert may have been developing something that even the Navy doesn’t know about. There’s danger and surprising discoveries all the way to the last few pages and a hint at the end that perhaps the story isn’t quite over.
A brisk but assertive tale, with plenty of spies, killers, and double-crossings to satiate readers.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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