A thriller that’s a little too convoluted for its own good but succeeds at updating the Masters of the Universe mindset to...
In Hatch’s debut novel, a Wall Street worker becomes the victim of an extortion scheme that ultimately forces him to confront his past.
David Belov is a quantitative programmer at Wall Street investment bank Montgomery Noyes. After his wife and young, diabetic son are kidnapped, David is forced to insert a special program into his company’s servers that will trigger a worldwide gold panic. In the wake of that incident, police find David’s family. However, police detective Jake Rivett, who cuts a bold figure riding from crime scene to crime scene on his Ducati, suspects David of helping to mastermind the gold crash scheme. Unable to convince Jake that he’s an innocent victim, David escapes from police custody and tries to clear his name. For help, he turns to his old friend Russian mobster Vlad Zhadanov. Along the way, David and Jake both stumble across an incredible financial conspiracy, and David and Vlad plan to pull off the most audacious heist in Wall Street history. A series of plot twists follows as the true shape of the conspiracy becomes clear to David, who’s forced to re-evaluate his shared past with Vlad. Hatch portrays David as a resourceful hero who rises to the occasion when things go against him. The story builds up to a lengthy heist sequence that’s a bit over the top but exciting to read nonetheless. The book gives almost equal weight to David’s back story, making this caper novel into something of a bildungsroman. But what truly elevates the tale is the author’s insider’s view of Wall Street traders and how they think and talk, with dialogue as entertainingly raunchy as that in The Wolf of Wall Street or the Showtime TV series Billions.
A thriller that’s a little too convoluted for its own good but succeeds at updating the Masters of the Universe mindset to the present.Pub Date: April 13, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Lookout Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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