Forsaking politics and legal legerdemain for standard shoot-’em-down combat thrills, flyboy-turned-lawyer Huston (Flash Point, 2000, etc.) proves he can do a tightly plotted, by-the-numbers military adventure as well as anyone.
You know those Pakistani extremists are bad boys when their leader, Air Force Major Riaz Khan, hoists a squirming underling into the air and strangles him barehanded. Having bungled an attempt to smuggle into Pakistan a cache of weapon-grade plutonium, Khan and his crew have been dosed with so much radiation that they have barely six months to live—just enough time to get an embassy official in Washington to bribe the undersecretary of defense to get them into the Navy’s TOPGUN school. Alas, TOPGUN is no longer accepting foreign pilots, but Lieutenant Luke “Stick” Henry, a former TOPGUN instructor who quit when he was blamed for an unavoidable aerial collision, is. Henry, along with TOPGUN buddies Thud, Scamp Sluf, and former Russian flyboy Vladimir “Vlad” Petkov, has leased a bunch of retired MiG fighters to start their own, for-profit flight-combat school in the Nevada desert. Henry loathes Khan on sight, but enrolls the Pakistanis because he needs the money. After a few days of training, the Pakistanis hijack four American jets and load them up with bombs. Henry and his pals hop into their MiGs but fail to stop Khan from blasting open a nuclear power plant’s spent fuel pit, spilling deadly radioactive fallout over much of southern California’s coastline. Khan escapes and Henry learns, through Vlad (who has unsavory connections with the Russian Mafia), that this was just a practice run for an attack on an Indian nuclear power plant. Vlad and Henry zoom off to India to save the day.
Easily predictable plotting, with fun facts about MiGs, sensational in-the-cockpit realism, and the stirring flyboy spirit that put Huston in the same firmament with Dean Koontz and Dale Brown.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17202-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Categories: SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
84
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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 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
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