Rich with world history and a burning central question, the story provides an array of real-life characters and fascinating...
From author Crutchley (Innovation Trends in Plastics Decoration and Surface Treatment, 2014) comes a novel concerning missing gold and the tumultuous world events in the time of Napoleon.
In the late 1700s, the colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) is in a state of upheaval. With the Revolution and resulting terrors sweeping France, places such as Le Cap (“the Paris of the Caribbean”) are starting to see violence. Having come to Saint-Domingue “to find fortune in a colony as far away as possible from the chaos in our motherland,” the narrator finds instead a hotbed of activity. After joining the army in Saint-Domingue, he sees his share of riots and revolts. It’s during one such operation to quell the chaos, when the army’s “sheer numbers totally surprised and shocked the…looters,” that the narrator finds his wife has been murdered and his son gone missing. In addition, a large amount of gold “sent to finance the restoration” is believed to have disappeared. So begins an investigation known as Black Carriage. What happened to the gold, and could it be related to the death of his wife? It’s an investigation that takes the reader to places as far-flung as Switzerland and Brazil. Part historical fiction, part investigative mystery, the book incorporates an enticing swath of the former. Readers familiar with the era will recognize Prince Pedro, Gen. Brune, Toussaint Louverture, and, of course, Napoleon; those unacquainted with such names will learn a great deal. Readers interested in the mystery will have to wade through dense periods of military maneuvering (such as with the French campaign through Europe) in order to find answers, but the journey is kept lively with well-written scenes of firing cannons and swinging swords (“I swung my sabre at a rebel crewman who jumped overboard to avoid me, and in the same sweep cut down one of his colleagues to my left just as he was raising his spike”).
Rich with world history and a burning central question, the story provides an array of real-life characters and fascinating locations.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 652
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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