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
Fast-paced, imaginative fun. May Kurt and crew survive, as there’s a good series to continue.
The latest maritime thriller in the NUMA series starring Kurt Austin (The Rising Sea, 2018, etc.)
In 1968, the French submarine Minerve sinks without a trace in the Mediterranean. In the present day, an oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing and badly injuring many workers. Enter Kurt Austin, head of Special Projects at the National Underwater Marine Agency. Kurt leads a team that assists in marine emergencies, so they respond to the Mayday call and quickly find a stream of underwater flame—escaping gas is burning in the water, down “as far as the eye could see.” It’s a fire that needs no oxygen, a phenomenon Kurt’s team has never seen. NUMA calls the disaster clear-cut sabotage, and Kurt’s assignment is to find the guilty party. Said party is Tessa Franco, CEO of Novum Industria, who is busily sabotaging oil production around the world. She wants to promote her new fuel cell to replace “this mad reliance on fossil fuels” and become even more stinking rich than she already is. She has “infected half the world’s major oil fields” by pumping oil-eating bacteria into them, rendering them useless. “She is the oil crisis,” Kurt tells the president. Kurt's and Tessa’s teams race to locate the Minerve, which may have critical genetic research Israel commissioned half a century ago. There are great action scenes underwater and on the surface, where Tessa’s seaplane, the Monarch, is almost as big as a 747. Rotten to the core, Tessa wants her lackeys to “get rid of Austin once and for all.” Her odds look mighty good considering the firepower she brings to bear.
Fast-paced, imaginative fun. May Kurt and crew survive, as there’s a good series to continue.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1902-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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