Frenetic action scenes do not a thriller make.
You got your neo-Nazis, your hidden treasure, your frenetic action scenes, your life-or-death, fate-of-the-nation issues . . . but it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that rooting interest.
Back for a second go-round is high-end art thief Tom Kirk, as woefully wooden as he was in his debut (The Double Eagle, 2005). Maybe more so, inasmuch as he’s reformed—rectitude, unfortunately, seldom counting for much in the charisma department. Approached by British Intelligence, Kirk learns of two related unsettling developments: (1) A Nazi derivative called Kristall Blade (derived in turn from Kristallnacht) has become virulently operational, and (2) the group has some kind of collusive relationship with Kirk’s erstwhile best friend, transmogrified through betrayal into his bitterest enemy. MI6 is asking for Kirk’s help, Agent Turnbull makes clear, with nothing tangible to offer in return, hoping instead to persuade him that Kristall Blade is not merely heinous but a dire threat to the nation’s stability. True enough, Agent Turnbull knows his man; still, it’s the name Henry Julius Renwick that really gets Kirk’s attention. And so he signs on, and before long is deeply involved in trying to determine how a seemingly humdrum painting connects to the mutilation and murder of a Holocaust survivor, connects to an elite Nazi secret society, connects to an American backwoods cult, connects to the gorgeous and storied Amber Room (commissioned by Frederick the Great as a gift for Catherine the Great), connects to a pair of decades-old trains in an abandoned Austrian copper mine. And how all of this connects to Henry (Judas) Renwick, Kirk’s bête noir, a man with as charmed a life as Holmes’s Moriarty—to whom, at a pivotal moment, bested and beleaguered, he gets to utter (“through clenched teeth”) that sturdy hack fiction line: “This isn’t over, Harry.”
Frenetic action scenes do not a thriller make.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-076214-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
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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