by Drew Howell ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2011
Though a slow start dims its shine, Howell’s freshman effort satisfies without indulging in dramatics.
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In Howell’s debut thriller about terrorism, conspiracy and corruption, a former government operative with a troubled past teams up with an FBI agent to untangle a dangerous web that stretches from Afghanistan to Washington.
A leak in the highest echelons of government sends intelligence agent Matt J. back into Afghanistan as an undercover private security officer with orders to collect intel on every congressional delegation visiting the country. While providing routine security detail for an anti-war congresswoman, an ambush leaves Afghani civilians dead and Matt facing a federal indictment. Whoever is leaking information is in league with the terrorists, but Matt doesn’t have the chance to prove it. Instead, he fakes his death and goes off the grid. Years later, a suspicious foreigner raises Matt’s hackles, and he’s suddenly back in the game, teaming up with FBI agent Samantha “Sam” Calvert to unearth a terrorist network. Their primary clue is a list containing 10 names and 10 cities. Someone higher up, though, doesn’t want Matt or Sam to discover the truth and repeatedly throws up roadblocks to their investigation. The whole mess is connected somehow—the botched security mission, the congresswoman, the list and maybe even the government itself. Howell knows his stuff and incorporates a plethora of detail on military movements in Afghanistan, government’s corrupt inner workings and intelligence gathering. The pacing slows, though, when he launches into unnecessary back story on secondary characters or unimportant information, and too many characters make it difficult to keep track of individual subplots. That aside, Howell’s gift for snappy dialogue and intricate plot twists keeps the story moving, and his timely, though familiar, theme of government corruption, negligence and political correctness involving the war on terror hits home. Fans of Tom Clancy’s meticulous page-turners will appreciate the book’s sublime detail and cracking wit.
Though a slow start dims its shine, Howell’s freshman effort satisfies without indulging in dramatics.Pub Date: May 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461126003
Page Count: 434
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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