Fast from the starting gate all the way to the finish line.
Briskly paced, vigorously written thriller about a man out to rescue his kidnapped 10-year-old son.
Author Rayburn—pen name for South African crime writer Roger Smith (Wake Up Dead, 2010, etc.)—kicks off this chase thriller with two startling scenes. The first surrounds Jane Ash, who, we later learn, may have been working for the United States against China. Now she's on an island beach, “part of a cluster flung like jewels between Bohai and the Yellow Sea.” As Jane gazes at paramour Victor Fabian, “a Zelig-like” associate of “dictators and strongmen and martinets," she spots a man who once made her feel "the kind of fear that came from being in the presence of pure evil.” She instinctively flees, climbing a sheer cliff, but the man pries her fingers loose and she falls to her death. The next scene, taking place a year later in a small town near Seattle, finds Jane’s son, Scooter, breakfasting with his father, Danny Ash, and a seemingly nurturing neighbor. In a stunning turnabout, the woman stops washing dishes, grabs a syringe, and plunges it into the boy’s neck. The boy pitches forward, the woman punches Ash in the gut, and "a scrum of men in dark clothes" burst in to abduct Scooter. Ash is off to find the boy. The kidnapped-child trope is well worn, but Rayburn revs it up. He throws Ash in with some perverse characters he draws in sharp, short takes. There are Patty Peach and her baby-faced accomplice, Orlando, assassins hired by Fabian. There's an information source too fat to leave his fetid bedroom. And there's Fabian, a clandestine associate of the president of the United States, who kidnapped the boy to silence Ash for telling the press the U.S. government had murdered his wife. Ash and company traverse an America of “sad, sagging houses” and “boarded up buildings,” presided over by “that clown in the Oval Office,” images adding heft to the foreground action. In the end, though, the Hitchcock-ian chase, speeding from the Northwest to the East Coast in search of the child, is the focus, and it’s more than enough.
Fast from the starting gate all the way to the finish line.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5385-0751-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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