A smart but uneven espionage tale.
A public affairs officer goes undercover to unravel the conspiracy behind a nuclear explosion that leveled Washington, D.C.
Shear (Near Miss, 2016, etc.) further immerses “accidental spy” Jackson Guild into the international intrigue behind the September 2009 attack that killed the U.S. president, most of Congress, and all of the Supreme Court justices, along with almost 60,000 citizens. It is now May 2010. Tricked by a former spy acquaintance, Elvin Krongartten, Guild is dispatched to Los Alamos, New Mexico. Under the pretext of writing a book, he is looking to get the goods on Edder Industries, “the most powerful management and engineering firm in America…a mom ’n’ pop shop…answerable to no stockholder,” which manages the nation’s entire nuclear weapons industry. Guild carries evidence that the Los Alamos lab whitewashed a report about the attack, and wants to find out who the “great and historic” Edder family is protecting. He is looking to hook up with malcontents he calls the Seven Dwarfs. He becomes involved with Dr. Alessandra Almont, his Snow White, “a modern-day Marie Curie” and Nobel Prize candidate who may have her own agenda. In addition, he freelances “a second parallel mission” to learn the truth about “a rumored fourth-generation nuclear weapon…no larger than a heavy Rubik’s Cube” and whose existence could threaten “to unhinge matters of war and peace.” Readers new to the series, of which this is the third entry, may struggle to get their bearings. The writing can be murky. For example, the first mention of the Seven Dwarfs refers to them as “possibles,” but possibles of what is not immediately clarified. In Edder Industries, Shear seems to be setting up a villain of Bondian proportions, but none surfaces. The Edders are only discussed. Some sentences are a bit wordy (“The name of the operation became for a time, the Seven Dwarfs, though it had nothing to do with the number seven or the Disney movie with those characters”). But the compact book is a quick read and Shear appears to know his scientific stuff. Tech-heads should relish lines like this one: “She repurposed the semiconductor substances used in computers to become the gatekeepers between two opposing mutually annihilating states of matter.” The ending is a doozy of a cliffhanger, suggesting a fourth book is in the offing.
A smart but uneven espionage tale.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 220
Publisher: BigWhitePaperPublishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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