Exciting but less than fully satisfying.
Fourth Victorian occult/steampunk adventure for Queen Victoria's special agents Sir Maurice Newbury and Miss Veronica Hobbes and their Scotland Yard counterpart, Chief Inspector Sir Charles Bainbridge (The Immorality Engine, 2011, etc.).
Bainbridge ponders a string of grisly murders, each with the victim’s chest cracked open and the heart torn out, and speculates as to a supernatural motive. Newbury, however, severely weakened by the occult treatments he’s giving to Amelia, Miss Hobbes’ psychic sister (she was severely damaged in the previous adventure), has another difficult problem. He’s been engaged by Edward, Prince of Wales, who, amid concerns that his mother is losing her grip on the nation, rumbles about German spies and the possibility of war. After some tepid sleuthing, it emerges that the murders are probably the work of an implacable mercenary known as the Executioner, a tattooed and seemingly immortal Frenchwoman with an artificial heart. Miss Hobbes, meanwhile, suspects Bainbridge of plotting against Queen Victoria, a dying and vindictive hulk kept alive only by repulsive machines. When summoned to the royal presence, our heroes loyally suppress treasonous thoughts but soon will no longer be able to ignore the mad, bad queen’s malign influence. And what, precisely, are the Prince of Wales’ real motives? The Executioner proves a worthy but one-dimensional antagonist, with a heroic Newbury enjoying several James Bond–ish escapades, royal plotting by inference rather than deduction, the doughty Miss Hobbes given nothing much to do and a great deal of stage-setting for future entries.
Exciting but less than fully satisfying.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2776-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
A new edition of the by now classic collection of affiliated stories which has already established its deserved longevity.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 1963
ISBN: 055338256X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1963
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