by Geoff Logan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2014
Requires some suspension of disbelief and an appreciation for medieval mythology.
Searching for purpose, Will McBride, a young man in 14th-century Scotland, encounters two Templar Knights and ultimately aides them as they attempt to mount a new Crusade to regain a foothold in Jerusalem with the goal of rebuilding Solomon’s Temple and heralding in the “End Time.”
Intrigued by his own Scottish heritage, debut Australian novelist Logan began researching the history of Scotland from the 14th to the 18th centuries. In the process, he became especially fascinated by the real saga of Sir Walter and Sir Robert Logan, brothers and knights. After the Catholic Church disbanded and excommunicated the Order of the Templars, in 1312, a number of knights escaped the European continent and continued their order under the protection of Robert the Bruce of Scotland. This much is history; the rest of the tale is imagined adventure, historical battles intertwined with Celtic mythology, a dose of Arthurian legend and enough magical idols with special powers to keep the fanciful satisfied. Sprinkled in is a trunk-full of sage advice and cautions dispensed to Will by a variety of mentors. There is plenty of interest in this dense volume—political intrigue as early kings vie for power, wealth and land; secret battles between Catholic priests and Templar Knights, each claiming to represent the true way to serve God; plus the search for hidden Templar gold and silver and a secreted statue known as the “Black Madonna” dating back to the days of Queen Esther of ancient Persia. There are also some engaging depictions of 14th-century day-to-day life. Unfortunately, grammatical problems—“more clearer,” “more easier,” punctuation oddities, etc.—prove distracting. Similarly out of place are the occasional colloquial phrases inappropriate for the period—“I tell you he is one sick puppy”—which are especially jarring in a narrative that otherwise tries to re-create the cadence of the time.
Requires some suspension of disbelief and an appreciation for medieval mythology.Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491864043
Page Count: 486
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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