A suspenseful and entertaining disaster novel.
James tells the story of a nuclear power plant employee racing to save New York City from destruction in this thriller.
Trace Crane, a control-room supervisor at the Bear Mountain Nuclear Energy Center in the Hudson Valley, is about to meet his wife and daughter for a much-needed long weekend at a friend’s beach house in Greenwich, Connecticut, when the entire center begins to move: “the shaking hit like a mortar detonation, like Godzilla had grabbed the building and was trying to rattle all its contents out.” It’s an earthquake that causes a stationwide blackout; coolant isn’t getting to the reactors, which means that a full nuclear meltdown is imminent. Trace’s thoughts go immediately to his wife, Avi, and young daughter, Brooklyn, who get separated in the chaos when the 6.4 earthquake hits their town of Peekskill, New York. It falls to Trace to stabilize the reactors and find his family—if he can calm his nerves and focus. As the situation deteriorates, however, doing the right things becomes increasingly difficult: He may be able to save New York from annihilation—but if he does so, he may never see his family again. James writes in a taut, propulsive prose style that wrings a surprising amount of tension and dynamism out of the situation, particularly considering the book’s nearly 400-page length. Trace is a delightfully flawed hero—both inside and out, according to the author’s unflattering descriptions: “Stress, anger, and annoyance hung heavy in his jowls, ebullience springing free in unexpected smatterings of rising cheeks. Trace scratched at a patch of chronic psoriasis on his nose—a crust of pinkish-white flaky skin falling onto his paperwork.” James also isn’t afraid to get into the minutiae of just how a nuclear reactor works—and how one would fail—creating a foundation of verisimilitude on which the disaster-movie–style plot turns rest. James doesn’t reinvent the genre, but he does succeed in creating a claustrophobic and anxiety-producing thriller that will keep readers counting down to the final second.
A suspenseful and entertaining disaster novel.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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