Not as tough as Westlake’s Richard Stark stories about Parker, not as humorous as his tales of the hapless thief Dortmunder,...
Fans of the beloved Westlake (1933-2008) will rejoice in this unexpected treat: a novel based on a treatment for a 1997 James Bond movie that the Chinese government’s displeasure prevented from going into production.
Approached by movie producer Jeff Kleeman, who provides an informative afterword here, about writing a sequel to Goldeneye, the first of the Pierce Brosnan Bonds, Westlake (The Getaway Car, 2014, etc.) spun out a doozy of a premise: a businessman who’s been tossed out of Hong Kong just as the Chinese take over the British colony plots revenge by using a soliton to create mega-waves that will flood tunnels bored into the landfill beneath parts of the island, bringing much of the place down in piles of rubble as the villain escapes with a fortune in looted gold. (You can see why the Chinese objected.) Unfortunately for scheming construction king Richard Curtis, his warm-up, in which he uses the soliton on his own private island off the Australian coast, is witnessed by Jerry Diedrich, the environmental activist of Planetwatch, who has a special reason for keeping a close eye on Curtis, and volunteer diver Kim Baldur, who leaps into the water in defiance of Curtis engineer George Manville’s no-trespassing warning moments before the soliton starts churning the waters. Against all odds, Kim survives the shock waves that follow. Curtis wants her dead anyway; Manville struggles to keep her alive. So begins a tale that caroms from Brisbane to Singapore to Hong Kong in the sturdiest Bond tradition, with all the obligatory double-crosses, counterespionage, and action set pieces you’d expect from a franchise entry that ticks off every Bond box except for Bond. What’s most fascinating here, in fact, is watching Westlake thriftily remix the ingredients he originally assembled for a franchise entry into a stand-alone that’s all his.
Not as tough as Westlake’s Richard Stark stories about Parker, not as humorous as his tales of the hapless thief Dortmunder, but a posthumous bonus fans will cherish anyway.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78565-423-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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