Enjoyable despite a few flaws, but damn, it’s dark.
A gangster heads to LA in this bleak sequel to City on Fire (2022).
It's 1988. Recently widowed drug dealer Danny Ryan wants to “get the hell out of Rhode Island,” where the victorious rival Moretti crime family wants him dead. He and a few buddies steal millions of dollars’ worth of the Morettis’ heroin, which he dumps into the ocean. Then they rob the gang of cold, hard cash, lots of it. But Danny won’t kill anyone. “We came for the money, not a massacre, Danny thought. Tens of millions of dollars in cash to start new lives, not keep reliving the old ones.” Then he and his pals head west to Tinseltown. More than anything else, he’d like to protect his young son, Ian, and raise him in a crime-free environment. Perhaps Danny’s estranged mother, Madeleine, can help if he’ll allow it. You’d think he’d keep a low profile, but instead he makes a series of blunders such as investing in a particular movie and boffing a famous actress. Thus, he forgets his old man’s advice: “When you’re on the run, you leave the skirts alone.” Danny is, to play on the book’s favorite profanity, effing inept. (Of course, if he does everything right there is no story, so there’s that.) Instead of leaving his East Coast troubles behind, he brings them along where they metastasize into bloody violence. The story is well crafted but for a deus ex machina ending, and even that is enough of a shocker that readers may not mind. Along the way are a couple of eye-popping twists. And there are some great lines: “I thought Jesus died for my sins…” Danny muses. “Maybe my sins just maxed out Christ’s credit card.” And “Ned Egan has killed more guys than cholesterol.” While the story can stand alone, readers might want to read City on Fire first, as it provides essential background and is the better story. There is a glimmer inside Danny Ryan suggesting he wants to become—could become—a good person if he can only survive. The story has no more violence than many other crime thrillers, but a sense of hopelessness progressively builds. Danny pisses off his enemies, has the FBI’s attention, and brings heartbreak to Hollywood. He may not live to raise his 3-year-old son.
Enjoyable despite a few flaws, but damn, it’s dark.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-285123-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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