Will the forces of good prevail? Stay tuned—but bet your bippy that there will be a sequel.
A lascivious senator meets an untoward end. The president’s bewildered daughter is involved—and so is tough but sensitive ATF agent Jack McClure, the hero of the piece.
Readers met McClure (and said bewildered one) in First Daughter (2009). Van Lustbader (The Testament, 2006, etc.), carefully fueling the franchise, drops us smack down where the thrills and spills left off. McClure, dyslexic but a close reader of human nature all the same, is now in President Edward Carson’s inner circle, charged, among other things, with keeping young missy out of danger. Fat chance, for the bad guys have designs on her, on the president, on all that is good and noble about the American way of life. Of course, there’s bunches of politicos on Capitol Hill who have no idea of what those ideals might mean, and they’ve been shacking up with the apparatchiks and new rich and uranium hustlers across the waters in Putin’s Russia, aka the Evil Empire. McClure knows that the game’s afoot, and that he’s pretty much on his own (“He had always been an outsider—from his dyslexia to his unorthodox upbringing he’s never fit in, and, as he’d finally been able to admit to himself if not to anyone else...he didn’t want to.”) Enter sweet, sassy and ever so lethal Annika, “a member of an undercover unit of the Russian Federal Police...you could call her a spy without fear of contradiction,” who has Electra complex issues of her own, and the fun really gets going. The necklines are low and the body count is high, fulfilling formula obligations; but Van Lustbader is an old hand at this spy-vs.-spy stuff, having resurrected Jason Bourne in the wake of Robert Ludlum’s departure from the planet, and he throws in enough twists and turns (and karate chops and slippery Crimean byways) to keep things original and interesting.
Will the forces of good prevail? Stay tuned—but bet your bippy that there will be a sequel.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2515-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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