An intriguing mysticism-tinged tale that bogs down in the telling.
A secret society targets a professor for assassination when he receives a mysterious package in this debut thriller.
In August 1986 at Terrace Hills’ Eastern State University, psychology professor Jason Butler’s life becomes upended when his friend and colleague Rick Volks, chairman of the religion department, sends him a large package with a dire warning: “DANGER! DANGER! DANGER! DON’T open or tell anyone. If something happens, DESTROY!!” And something does happen: When Jason visits Rick’s office, he discovers his friend dead, with a scruffy stranger kneeling over him whose attack the professor barely escapes. Reasoning that he might need the package’s information to protect himself and his family, Jason ignores the warnings and opens it. Inside are texts sacred to the Shra’kufans, an almost unknown Middle Eastern sect dedicated to assassinating anyone who exposes its secrets. Rick took the risk because the texts are a gold mine for scholarship, but he suffered the cost. Over the next 24 hours, Jason must dodge both the police, who seem to regard him as a suspect, and the fanatical Shra’kufan killer, all while learning as much as he can about the shadowy sect and putting aside worries for his family, which is unreachable. Meanwhile, Jason considers what’s brought him here, such as his unhappy childhood, his wife, personal struggles, and his experiences with tai chi and meditation. Jason may have the paradoxical key to defeating the assassin’s poison—but only by putting himself in mortal danger. In his book, Beere tells a Hitchcock=ian suspense story of an ordinary man thrust unwittingly into extraordinary circumstances. The pre-internet setting adds to the suspense since research is much more difficult and painstaking. Jason’s practice of meditation and tai chi isn’t just a character note; it also ties in perfectly with the novel’s resolution in a compelling way. Similarly, the sacred texts are plausible and important to the plot. But the tale loses much of its thriller momentum in overly dwelling on repetitious points like Jason’s feelings of inadequacy, his unsympathetic father, and the hero’s need for validation.
An intriguing mysticism-tinged tale that bogs down in the telling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Cardon Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
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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