An intriguing but overcomplicated thriller lumbered with flat characters.
In Gimple’s thriller, an assassin joins with a military contractor to take down an association of vigilantes.
Jake Marks is a professional tennis player primed for success at the U.S. Open. He is also an assassin who operates under the moniker “The Lone Ranger.” Employed by the Millennium Society—a purported think tank that is more like a politically-motivated band of vigilantes—Jake is regularly tasked with the killings of alleged bad guys who, more often than not, just seem to interfere with potential warmongering. Such is the case with Jake’s latest target, Russell Townsend, a physicist who desires “the end of the nuclear arms race.” When Jake kills him, the reporter interviewing Townsend also gets shot, leading Jake to reevaluate his murderous moonlighting gig. The deceased reporter was the wife of Col. James Kelleher, a rough and ballsy military contractor. In an effort to suss out his wife’s killer, Kelleher winds up with the leaders of the Millennium Society, who tell him to go after the Lone Ranger. It is at about this point that the plot grows difficult to parse: The disillusioned Jake attempts to quit his assassin gig, and the main players in the Millennium Society pit Jake and Kelleher against each other, charging each with murdering the other. The situation becomes more complex when Jake manipulates Kelleher’s estranged daughter, Maggie, into training him and traveling with him to London. Once there, the two quickly fall in love. Further developments include the attempted assassination of a famous musician and the kidnapping of Maggie. Gimple’s intricately woven tale is admirably ambitious, and the detailed settings, from New York streets to London landmarks, are impressively rendered. The characters, though, fall flat. Kelleher’s brashness is one-note, and when he warns Maggie of Jake’s true identity, she requests a chance to prove that the accusation is baseless—which she almost immediately fails to do, instead choosing to bask in her naïveté.
An intriguing but overcomplicated thriller lumbered with flat characters.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990761551
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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