Agreeably tense and complex.
Three spy networks become entangled in London as Nazi bombs drop in the last days of American neutrality. The old thriller formulae continue to work brilliantly.
Tom Wall, a Yank who couldn’t wait for America to enter the war, took the King’s shilling and saw war at its worst in the doomed rearguard action to hold Crete. Hospitalized back in Britain, Wall’s case of shell shock is aggravated by his belief that his brother Earl, an employee of Bill Donovan’s fledgling American intelligence outfit, betrayed the Brits on Crete as the Nazis overran the island. Now Earl has gone missing, and Tom’s furious need to find his brother has played into the hands of British intelligence operatives who hold as their prisoner a very senior spy with his own reasons to speak to Earl. When the Brits, who are frantic to protect their successful penetration of Germany’s English spy ring, dress up Tom as Earl and send him in to see their captive, Sondegger, the German, is not fooled. Sondegger’s agenda is to keep America out of the fight. Manipulating Tom from his cell, he sends the battered young man out into London to find the bit of microfilm that Earl was to have taken to the embassy. The microfilm reveals the Japanese plans for an impending attack on Pearl Harbor. Woozy from hospital drugs and in constant pain from a battle-ravaged left hand, Tom thrashes his way around the city on Earl’s trail, reunites with Lady Harriet, Earl’s wife and Tom’s lost love, meets a ravishing stripper in one of Earl’s old haunts, gets badly battered by two thugs working for a fascist peer who just happens to be Lady Harriet’s father, gets thrown back in the hospital, escapes and throws himself back into the fray. Meanwhile, a pretty German spy runs loose, cheerfully slicing up intelligence agency employees as the time draws near for her transmittal back home of the report that will blow the whistle on the British subversion of the Nazi spies.
Agreeably tense and complex.Pub Date: July 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51388-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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