A thriller that offers a good read for a week at the beach.
In this novel, scuba diver Olsen (The Hero of Blind Pig Island and Other Island Stories, 2012, etc.) takes readers from a shipwreck 200 years ago to a present-day tale of greed, political intrigue, and mayhem.
The story starts with a rousing sea battle in 1806 that sees the fearsome French warship Imperial destroyed, sunk by the British off small Charming Island in the Caribbean. In the aftermath, an impressed American seaman, Reginald “Reggie” V. Wilson, is murdered by a French sailor named Francois Javert. Fast-forward 150 years to young Warren Wilson in Minnesota, whose family lore tells of Reggie’s murder. Warren becomes fascinated with scuba diving, even after (or perhaps because of) the drowning of his older brother, Steven, in 1955, after he saved Warren’s life. Warren narrowly escapes a financial scam but comes out of it with a boat that he renames Esteban. He becomes a dive captain on Charming Island, where he lives a rough life, save for his lover, Rosa, and her son, Armando. He’s indebted to a fat man named, yes, Javert, who comes off as a kind of Caribbean Jabba the Hutt. Warren (now known as “Captain Will”) is apolitical, but a vote is looming for the Charming Islanders. Will they remain a tiny British commonwealth or choose independence? For his own nefarious reasons, Javert is pushing for independence, and he hires a true supervillain named Wesley Bens for his cause. All of this climaxes in a suitably white-knuckle fashion, as good guys seek to triumph over bad. Olsen can turn a good phrase (‘narcissism became both his cancer and his chemo,” he writes at one point about Warren) and he gives his characters each the attention that he or she deserves. The plot is also well-paced, and Olsen keeps the twists coming: for example, some Cuban commandos show up, and Captain Will gets support from his old scuba instructor, Freddie-the-Frogman; his old love, Ruth Van Dorn; and a Texas couple, the Whites, who are initially obnoxious but eventually heroic, as redemption is a major theme of the book.
A thriller that offers a good read for a week at the beach.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hoffman House Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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