A fun diversion with a bracing hero and sequel potential.
A random recent photo of a man presumed dead following the 9/11 attack spurs an investigative team to try to determine the truth about his disappearance—by any means possible.
Kyle Royce lives a double life in the manner of Bruce Wayne. He is the frontman for his family’s fabulously successful currency trading firm and nonprofit Royce Foundation. But his actual work is “cloak and dagger stuff,” tackling missing person cases “no one else can solve.” One such endeavor—which kicks off the novel in high gear—is rescuing a man’s son who had been kidnapped by a powerful Brazilian family. Royce and his team’s newest case, Phillip Peterson, formerly worked in fraud and security for a credit card company with offices in the World Trade Center. Was he killed in the terrorist attack, or is something more sinister afoot? Royce reassures Peterson’s sister that he and his “devoted staff with some unique skills and connections” will get results. “Our methods are sometimes unorthodox and, at times, controversial,” he admits. Or, in the words of Shakespeare, “To do a great right, do a little wrong.” But the hunters become the prey as their investigation uncovers the credit card company’s questionable doings. “There are some very powerful people and institutions that will not want the world to know this information,” Royce is warned at one point. Meanwhile, the Brazilians are stepping up pressure to retrieve the boy that Royce reunited with his father. But Royce has a simple lesson: “If you fuck with me, you will lose.” That kind of bravado makes the hero an enjoyable figure to follow around the world. He deserves future adventures that will hopefully further flesh out his colleagues. Only two, his best friend and former NFL player, Cleat Williams, and Jennifer Parks-Hudson, an investigator with whom Royce may have more than a professional interest, get major page time. Dahler (Water Hazard, 2010, etc.) lays on Royce’s badass attitude a little thick (“I can be a real grade-A asshole when I want to be. It’s a gift”) and character banter is strained, but the author keeps the plot moving with plenty of action.
A fun diversion with a bracing hero and sequel potential.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Fairfield
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2017
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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