Johansen dumps a host of bad guys on the trail of an animal psychic in her latest action-packed damsel-in-distress outing.
Margaret Douglas mentally communicates with animals, a trait that comes in very handy while helping a tiger accept the cub she has rejected. But a phone call from her friend Dr. Devon Brady from the Caribbean island where Margaret used to work sends her frantically packing her bags and going on the run—again. Margaret, who ran away from home at age 8 to live in the woods, later escaped from Vadaz Island, the home of the evil Stan Nicos, a criminal who enjoys having sex with young girls as well as torturing them. Margaret vowed never to return to Vadaz Island, and she's been hiding out from Nicos, trying to keep her location secret, but Devon tells her that a man named John Lassiter and his companion, Neal Cambry, are on her trail. It turns out Lassiter is planning to trade her to Nicos in return for something Nicos has of his. Like most of Johansen’s novels, this one features a strong, capable woman. Margaret initially fights Lassiter and Cambry. But also as in most of Johansen’s novels, while it may feel like the book is moving fast, what the characters do most is talk—about what they’ve done, what they’re doing, and what they’re going to do. There is so much conversation between Lassiter and Margaret that many of the chapters read like plays. Johansen (Night Watch, 2016, etc.) has perfected a formula her readers adore by taking a beautiful woman with extraordinary abilities, putting her in danger, and tossing in a gorgeous, smitten man, which is certainly the case here. And while the sexual tension between Margaret and Lassiter may make a few hearts flutter, the best character in the book by far is a beautiful, pregnant dog.
The author’s told this story many times before, but it never gets old to her many devotees.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07584-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Categories: SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
Did you like this book?
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
GET IT
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
Did you like this book?
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
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
