A competent actioner: The Bourne Supremacy with a smattering of Froissart, and enough car chases and explosions to keep...
Let’s see: There’s a secret Catholic cult that harbors a secret so faith-shaking that Christianity might collapse were it known. They’re willing to kill for it. Hmmm . . .
The good news is that Lustbader (The Veil of a Thousand Tears, 2002, etc.), a prolific author of genre pieces, can actually write. That alone distinguishes him from Dan Brown. The bad news is that this book is too long and a touch too shaggy—and that, no matter what, it’s likely to draw comparison to The Da Vinci Code. There are some gross similarities, but never mind. The hero is a medieval-studies ninja who knows how to love and fight, to say nothing of pray, thanks to a father who just happens to be a higher-up in the Order of Gnostic Observatines—a bunch of Franciscans who haven’t quite absorbed the founder’s message of peace. Dad, though, gets blown up by baddies in the service of the pope, a way-top-secret gang of priestly pummelers called the Knights of St. Clement. There’s been bad blood between the two organizations for generations, as Braverman Shaw, aka Bravo, discovers when it’s his turn to bop around New York and Venice and Paris and Trabzon (“As a student of medieval religions you’re no doubt disappointed to see what’s become of fabled Trebizond, eh?”) and points between to fight for the true faith. Braverman bears his own cross—it’s enough to say that thin ice and a sibling figure in the tale—but is still present enough to acquit himself well with the ripe Jenny Logan, another member of the Order who may or may not be telling all she knows. He does okay when put up against those evil Knights, too, one of them a pretty girl with a rather skimpy suit of armor and a talent for making men talk.
A competent actioner: The Bourne Supremacy with a smattering of Froissart, and enough car chases and explosions to keep things interesting.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-765-31463-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.
The smartest shamus on earth tracks the planet’s cleverest lowlife in the latest to roll from the Cussler assembly line (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.).
In 1906, they didn’t come any nastier than the Butcher Bandit, who, when the book opens, has already racked up 38 kills, a goodly number of them women and children. He robs banks, murdering—remorselessly—any unfortunate who happens to be on the premises at the time. So adept at the work is he, we’re told exhaustively, that he’s commonly believed to be uncatchable. Which is why Isaac (“He always gets his man”) Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency is assigned the case. But the Butcher Bandit is a slippery one indeed. Not only brilliant, audacious and cold-blooded beyond measure, he is also not the stuff of which bottom-feeders are usually made. For it turns out that the master criminal who has robbed banks all over the Southwest is actually a bank president himself. In San Francisco, the extremely solvent Cromwell Bank is a byword for respectability, its founder and chief executive a pillar of the community. That would be Jacob Cromwell, aka the much sought after Butcher Bandit. So how to explain Cromwell’s deep, dark plunge into criminality? He loves the challenge, he says. There’s also that new word, Bell explains to an understandably puzzled colleague, that psychology professionals are beginning to use: sociopath. At any rate, the game’s afoot, the antagonists perfectly matched, with Cromwell convinced he can rob, kill and elude capture, and Bell promising not to rest “until I capture the man responsible for these hideous crimes.”
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15438-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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