by J. J. Ballesteros ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2019
A laudable protagonist shares the spotlight with exemplary supporting characters in this enthralling gang tale.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
In this second installment of a thriller series, a Mexican drug lord coerces a charter boat captain into smuggling a shipment of guns from Texas.
Drug trafficker Fausto “El Demonio” López wants Simon Donovan to work for him. In Panama, Donovan was a notorious smuggler who skirted but never outright broke the law. He now runs a charter business in the Mexican city of Campeche—Fausto’s neck of the woods. Fausto is currently planning to “seize control of the Campeche gangs.” But that requires guns, and after losing a cocaine shipment, Fausto has trouble securing more of the drug and consequently is short on funds. His henchman José Luis finally gets assistance from Houston associate Billy Chávez, and now all they need is a way to transfer the guns to Campeche. This seems like a perfect job for Donovan, who turned down Fausto’s previous offer of employment. So Fausto has his minions abduct Itzél Canek, a local minister’s wife with whom Donovan is undeniably in love. To ensure Itzél’s safety, Donovan sails his ship, the Siete Mares, to Texas to retrieve the guns. But with Fausto’s armed men onboard, Donovan has good reason to suspect the untrustworthy drug lord is plotting a double cross. Ballesteros (Run for the Devil, 2017) packs his story with riveting subplots, including a war with various drug cartels in Campeche and even a possible informant working with Billy in Texas. Unfortunately, this leads to narrative stretches without Donovan, whose situation isn’t quite as dire as those of some of the characters featured in the subplots. But by the final act, Donovan and others are in unmistakable peril. Moreover, there’s absorbing melodrama throughout. For example, Itzél’s husband, Benício, doesn’t cause his wife’s affair; he’s been good to her and raised her son, Poli, as his own. Complicating matters is the fact that Donovan’s still mourning the loss of his fiancee, Xóchitl, an apparent dead ringer for Itzél. In one scene, Donovan, while discussing Itzél, inadvertently calls her Xóchitl. Since this volume is part of a trilogy, the story ends on a juicy cliffhanger.
A laudable protagonist shares the spotlight with exemplary supporting characters in this enthralling gang tale.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6846-1
Page Count: 390
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
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.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
138
Our Verdict
GET IT
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Max Brooks
BOOK REVIEW
by Max Brooks
More About This Book
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.