A whimsical sequel to Carroll’s Top Dog (1996) pits reformed greenmailer (and diehard dog lover) Bogey Ingersoll against satanic plotters who want to elect a malevolent billionaire to the Presidency. Previously, Wall Street bad-boy Bogey found himself transformed into a dog and taken on a tour de farce through a leafy fantasy world where, after tipping the balance of power between bad angel Zalthazar and good angel Helither, he learned humility and the virtue of self-sacrifice. Now, safely installed in a southern California mansion that he shares with 50 garrulous mutts, Bogey is rich beyond his dreams and celebrated in made-for-TV movies as the millionaire who thought he was a dog. Meantime, he carries on Dr. Doolittle—like conversations with his four-legged friends and tries not to think too much about his divorce from his trophy bride Felicity. Still, his sleep is haunted by disturbing dreams in which he’s once again a dog and some unseen beasty from the fantasy world is out to get him. Then, after a silly charity gathering of California’s ridiculously rich, Bogey finds himself framed for the gory disembowelment of Battle Creek cereal heir Winston Byron. Suspecting that the dreaded Pig Faces—the aforementioned beasties—have set him up, Bogey hires jet-setting Bill Clancy, the best lawyer money can buy, to keep the cops at bay. He also falls for the beautiful Dr. Alex Epperly. Sadly, though, it’s money, not love, that’s needed to oppose bad angel Zalthazar, regnant once again and positioning the ultra-wealthy Barney Soderberg (Warren Buffet with bad hair) to run for President. With Pig Faces, harpies, and a feckless Incubus slithering about to dispatch Soderberg’s enemies, Bogey allies himself anew with Helither. An amusing, featherweight spoof of sex-and-money political novels, with good triumphing only because evil has its price.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-441-00597-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
Back to a Jurassic Park sideshow for another immensely entertaining adventure, this fashioned from the loose ends of Crichton's 1990 bestseller. Six years after the lethal rampage that closed the primordial zoo offshore Costa Rica, there are reports of strange beasts in widely separated Central American venues. Intrigued by the rumors, Richard Levine, a brilliant but arrogant paleontologist, goes in search of what he hopes will prove a lost world. Aided by state-of- the-art equipment, Levine finds a likely Costa Rican outpostbut quickly comes to grief, having disregarded the warnings of mathematician Ian Malcolm (the sequel's only holdover character). Malcolm and engineer Doc Thorne organize a rescue mission whose ranks include mechanical whiz Eddie Carr and Sarah Harding, a biologist doing fieldwork with predatory mammals in East Africa. The party of four is unexpectedly augmented by two children, Kelly Curtis, a 13-year-old "brainer," and Arby Benton, a black computer genius, age 11. Once on the coastal island, the deliverance crew soon links up with an unchastened Levine and locates the hush-hush genetics lab complex used to stock the ill- fated Jurassic Park with triceratops, tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, etc. Meanwhile, a mad amoral scientist and his own group, in pursuit of extinct creatures for biotech experiments, have also landed on the mysterious island. As it turns out, the prehistoric fauna is hostile to outsiders, and so the good guys as well as their malefic counterparts spend considerable time running through the triple-canopy jungle in justifiable terror. The far-from-dumb brutes exact a gruesomely heavy toll before the infinitely resourceful white-hat interlopers make their final breakout. Pell-mell action and hairbreadth escapes, plus periodic commentary on the uses and abuses of science: the admirable Crichton keeps the pot boiling throughout.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41946-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
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