by Iris Johansen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2013
An arresting conclusion to the Eve Duncan trilogy.
After an explosive showdown in Colorado among the CIA, Eve Duncan's loved ones and a furious Jim Doane, Eve is Doane’s captive again, but the stakes are higher than anyone imagined, and getting Eve to safety is shadowed by an even deadlier threat.
Renowned forensic sculptor Eve is captive again to evil Jim Doane. Doane set up an intricate escape amid a fiery explosion in a Colorado ghost town and is convinced he’s fooled everyone into thinking he and Eve are both dead. However, Eve’s loved ones—her lover, Joe Quinn, her adopted daughter, Jane, and an assorted group of smart, well-connected allies—have figured out they are alive. They are also suspicious of the CIA, whom Eve works for and yet who seem more concerned with taking Doane out than in rescuing Eve. Gathering clues while keeping under Doane’s radar screen, they are confronted with the horrifying reason the CIA—and their contact, Agent Venable—is less concerned with Eve’s welfare than they are: Doane’s deceased son, Kevin, left two armed nuclear weapons somewhere in the U.S., and the CIA believes Doane will set them off. Doane is out for revenge and has abducted Eve to recreate his son’s skull, believing that making that happen will bring Kevin back to life somehow. However, Eve also has a surprising connection to Zander, the man responsible for Kevin’s death, and Doane is using her as bait to draw the enigmatic assassin to her rescue. Meanwhile, Jane and her friends realize that Doane isn’t actually the person behind the destructive Grand Plan. They must race a ticking time bomb to discover the whereabouts of the detonator and the weapons and keep Eve and two major metropolitan areas safe. The novel offers a multilayered plot with a long cast of characters Johansen fans will recognize from the first two books in the trilogy as well as other series. The continued sexual tension between Jane and her two would-be lovers ratchets up to a surprising conclusion, and the intriguing hints at ghostly help and psychic talent to solve the many mysteries add texture, romance and enigma to a taut, compelling storyline.
An arresting conclusion to the Eve Duncan trilogy.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02002-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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 TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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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