Easily predictable plotting, with fun facts about MiGs, sensational in-the-cockpit realism, and the stirring flyboy spirit...
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
