A uniquely raw medical thriller brimming with perfect comedic timing.
In this fiction debut, disaster stalks a vacationing doctor, his family, and thousands of fellow cruise ship guests.
Dr. Martin Walker, podiatrist, has just embarked on a cruise out of Galveston, Texas. He and his family are on the 14-deck ship The Grand Decadence. The trip is meant to help Martin and his preteen daughter, Haley, spend some time together, as they’ve grown apart lately. His mother-in-law, Veronica Covington, hasn’t helped the situation, with her incessant commentary on Martin’s generous weight and supposed cowardice. The journey begins forbiddingly when the lobster dinner makes a guest named Linda violently ill. Martin helps Linda’s husband carry her to the infirmary, where he meets Dr. Floros. As a germophobe, Martin suspects more than indigestion and realizes the ship is understaffed to handle an outbreak of norovirus, or other easily communicable diseases. Meanwhile, Yegor Petrenko, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Petretech, watches The Grand Decadence from monitors in a secluded Alaskan village. He also follows the progress of Cindy, a tropical storm growing in the Gulf of Mexico. As more people become sick on the ship, Dr. Floros narrows the disease down to a parasite. She then notices that the parasite contains the DNA of two separate species, which, she tells Martin, “can't occur naturally. The odds against that happening are staggering.” Chambers infuses his novel with terrific dollops of medical science, wit, and bathroom humor (often literally), presenting audiences with a revenge blockbuster Stephen King would enjoy. Casual readers, however, should be warned that Chambers truly relishes crafting gross-out passages, including one at a buffet in which a vomiting woman “rotated from left to right as the torrent arced across the sneeze guards like a pressure wash.” Also impressive is the author’s pistonlike control over character development and pace; the better readers understand the horrendous Veronica and the odd Capt. Brooks, the faster they will turn pages to learn their fates. And because awful luck follows Martin throughout the ship (including fistfights and marital infidelity), know that the finale is a foul yet sublime missive to fans of raunch everywhere.
A uniquely raw medical thriller brimming with perfect comedic timing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 448
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
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
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