Sometime-graphic-novelist Rucka again crosses genres with positive results. Not much new here, but energetically done and...
In Rucka’s latest (The Last Run, 2010, etc.), the sneak attack on WilsonVille—world’s largest theme park—is no Mickey Mouse operation.
Master Sgt. Jad Bell, Delta Forces veteran, senses something catastrophic blowing in the wind and meant for WilsonVille. Of course he does. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been deployed there. Still, he doesn’t know precisely where or exactly when, and his bosses tell him they don’t either. Normally, he’d take that in stride, since it’s really what his 18 years of training has always been about—uncertainty and the coping with it, no matter its shape or time of arrival. The circumstance that makes this different and unsettling, however, is a piece of information just received. Jad, undercover as deputy director in charge of park security, has suddenly learned that among the 60,000 likely visitors this coming Friday will be a contingent from the Hollyoakes School for the Deaf, a group that will include his adored daughter Athena as well as his ex-wife Amy. Switch now to young Gabriel Fuller, terrorist. Actually, he’s a terrorist in training and has been for more than 10 years, a period during which he was charged with becoming seamlessly American. In the jargon of the trade, Gabriel is a sleeper—someone planted early on in a position to infiltrate, then later awakened for the sake of the mission: Inflict maximum damage from the inside. In that way, Gabriel has made himself a WilsonVille mainstay. Costumed as Pooch—feckless, endearingly clumsy, endlessly affectionate—he captures hearts and minds on a regular basis. The carefully planned attack is mounted, and hostages are taken, among them, inevitably, Jad’s Athena. But Gabriel, too, has some nasty shocks awaiting him.
Sometime-graphic-novelist Rucka again crosses genres with positive results. Not much new here, but energetically done and not a comic strip character in sight.Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-18228-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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