A well-founded dilemma for the protagonist topped off with an exciting robbery attempt.
In Wright’s debut thriller, the FBI enlists the help of an Atlanta detective to track down a parolee he put in prison who’s apparently plotting an armored-car heist.
The feds believe that Vince Taglierri’s the guy to find Troy Bronson after the recently paroled ex-con goes missing. After all, Vince caught him the first time—and now Troy’s faxing the FBI, taunting the police detective to catch him again. Vince’s captain agrees to the plan but partners him with another detective, Paul “Pinky” Sturman, citing Vince’s feeble closure stats. The cops talk to Troy’s former cellmate, Guy, who drops a bombshell: Troy is scheming to rob a truck transporting Federal Reserve Bank funds. The ex-con himself later asks to meet Vince at a gentlemen’s club, offering to cut him in for a cool $3 million if he redirects the FBI’s attention away from him. The detective may have further incentive to take the money after he reads up on the Federal Reserve and thinks that it may be taking advantage of taxpaying citizens. He starts a relationship with Troy’s lawyer, Gloria Douglas, but isn’t sure if her involvement in the ex-con’s plan is deeper than she leads Vince to believe. He also runs into a ski-masked man waiting at his apartment to kill him. The cop is left with a choice between taking easy money or upholding the law, but he can’t decide whom to trust. Wright’s 2004 backdrop sets an appropriate mood, with hurricanes Ivan and Jeanne flooding the story with torrential rain. Among the secondary characters, the good and bad guys are almost indistinguishable from one another; robbers Cole and Ray are just as charming and fascinating as Pinky, a councilman’s son whose nickname is derived from his now-useless digit, which he injured years ago. The real villain, it seems, is capitalism: money winds up in many hands, and it usually doesn’t end well. This notion goes a bit too far, though, when a claims adjuster visits Vince in the hospital and he threatens to kill her if she bills him; the scene succeeds only in making him seem more violent than most of the criminals.
A well-founded dilemma for the protagonist topped off with an exciting robbery attempt.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5309-4442-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2016
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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