With his no-nonsense style and shrewd sense of variety and pacing, Forsyth remains a superior (if unoriginal and...
Another Forsyth countdown thriller--this time in 1987 Britain, where (in the novel's last 150 pages) the men of MI5 will be madly scrambling in order to prevent a USSR-engineered nuclear "accident."
Before the countdown begins, however, Forsyth teasingly moves back and forth between two slowly-developing plots, which will link up only in the novel's final moments. Plot #1: British Intelligence accidentally learns (thanks to the patriotism of a top jewel-thief) that there's a leak high up in the Defense Ministry; John Preston of MI5 eventually traces this leak to right-winger George Berenson, who thinks he's been slipping secrets to South Africa...but has really been slipping them to a Soviet mole within South Africa's diplomatic corps! (Preston's sleuthing takes him to South Africa, and back into WW II archives.) More central, however, is Plot #2: in Moscow aged Kim Philby (a nice cameo) is helping the USSR General Secretary to formulate ""Plan Aurora""--whereby a nuclear accident in England will swing the upcoming general election over to the Labour Party (which now belongs to the "Hard Left"), ushering in a Marxist-Leninist "British Revolution," not to mention the end of NATO. And Plan Aurora involves the infiltration of a dozen or so Soviet (non-KGB) agents into England, each one carrying some ingredient for Moscow's violation of the "Fourth Protocol." (One of the secret clauses in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, this Protocol bans the hostile use of miniature, smuggled-in nuclear weapons.) Preston of MI5 begins to suspect what Moscow is up to when one of the Soviet couriers is accidentally apprehended in Scotland, carrying "a disk of pure polonium"--which, when placed next to a disk of lithium, becomes a nuclear-bomb "initiator." A search for other Soviet infiltrators begins, eventually focusing (with SAS support) on the key bomb-man, an English-speaking mole. But, though Preston & Co. are super-efficient, successfully closing in on the villains before the explosion, it's eventually revealed that the English were being aided all along by certain forces within Russia--a development which links up (too predictably, too late) with that other, Defense Ministry-leak subplot. This not-quite-satisfactory interplay between the plot-pieces is only one weakness of Forsyth's new thriller: the characters are all rather flat; the countdown lacks Jackal-level tension; the political material (Labour Party background, etc.) is ladled on with a heavy hand. No matter.
With his no-nonsense style and shrewd sense of variety and pacing, Forsyth remains a superior (if unoriginal and unmesmerizing) entertainer--and this lesser effort is sure to grab the same no-frills readership (not a speck of romance or sex here) that has made him a top-seller again and again.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1984
ISBN: 9780553251135
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
IN THE NEWS
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
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.
A widowed and disgraced plastic surgeon is drawn into a Russian oligarch’s evil schemes.
Witherspoon’s adult fiction debut, co-authored with thrillermeister Coben, opens as heart surgery performed by Dr. Marc Adams in a North African refugee camp is interrupted by the explosive invasion of armed militants. It's the last we will see of Marc in this dimension. The next chapter jumps ahead one year to a ceremony at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where his widow, Maggie McCabe, is supposed to be presenting an award in honor of her mother. Miserable and anxious about appearing in public after having lost her medical license, she consults with her late husband on her phone—not via supernatural means, but using a "griefbot," an amazingly lifelike and functional AI app created by her genius sister, Sharon. Once the griefbot coaxes her to brave the sneering masses, she learns she’s been replaced on the podium anyway. But she runs into a former professor, a celebrity plastic surgeon, who requests a meeting with her at his office in New York and won’t take no for an answer. Next thing she knows, there’s $10 million in her bank account and she’s on a private plane heading to a palace outside Moscow where she’s been engaged to perform off-the-record surgery on billionaire Oleg Ragoravich (new face) and his girlfriend, Nadia (new boobs). And…we’re off. A whirl of surgeries, chases, and escapes ensues as Maggie gradually comes to understand who these people are and what they have in mind for her, and how it connects to Marc and their missing friend and business partner, Trace Packer. She is aided by her delightful father-in-law, Porkchop, owner of a biker bar in New York City and a very handy guy to have on your team if you've run afoul of an international criminal organization. From the palace in Rublevka the action moves to Dubai and then Bordeaux, climaxing in a high-stakes illegal heart transplant. But wait—is Marc really dead? What happened to Trace? Who is Nadia really? Though these smoldering questions don’t quite catch fire, it's a good first try for Witherspoon.
Maybe not the most thrilling thriller, but the role of AI in coping with grief gives this novel pathos and interest.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538774700
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
