An Australian federal police officer discovers that some things “you can’t hide forever” when she becomes embroiled in a deadly mystery shrouded for 70 years.
Fans of conspiracy thrillers eagerly await the part when a shadowy figure warns the protagonist, who may know something but is unsure what: “This should be the end of it for you….Do yourself a favour, wait a few years and write a book complete with your own grassy knoll.” But the character never does, and Kate Austin is no exception. “Talented but underprepared,” the officer is installed as the head of a task force investigating the M.I. Boys, a small but “extremely violent, relentless” group whose ranks are growing with recruited “disaffected Middle Eastern youth.” The M.I. Boys are tied to the murders of two undercover agents in regard to a theft of munitions, but Austin begins to suspect that something other than terrorism is afoot as the body count escalates (one character compares her to Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote, in that, as with Austin, “murders seem to follow” Mrs. Fletcher around). But when a former lover becomes a victim, Austin vows, “Vengeance is my only closure.” Her probe unravels an elaborately tangled plot that dates back to the decades-old murder (ruled an accident at the time) of the Australian prime minister and, 30 years before that, to an Australian desert expedition led by the ill-fated Harold Lasseter. Lasseter claimed to have discovered a gold-bearing reef, adding what one character calls “a touch of Allan Quatermain” to the story. Austin’s intense inquiry leads to possibly sinister goings-on at a supersecret “communications facility.” In Austin, debut author Hahn has created a credible figure formidable enough to shoulder further adventures. He writes potent action scenes with a vivid sense of place. The tale remains immersive in its Australian patois (“You’re on your Pat Malone out here mate”) and landscapes (“The craft had completed a brief pass over the sheer red sandstone cliffs of Kings Canyon and its Wilderness Lodge. On the horizon, they could make out the outline of the monolith of Uluru and the domes of Kata Tjuta”). But context and Google can help keep readers from getting lost. This is an auspicious beginning of a planned trilogy.
A vibrant, intricate thriller with a resolute investigator seeking to expose secrets that involve murder and a fraught expedition.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5144-9617-6
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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 REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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