Well researched, but this time Clarkson might better have taken a page from James M. Cain’s insurance classic, Double...
Heavy-hitter Clarkson whacks a two-bagger rather than cleaning the plates as usual.
The first half perennially promises thrills ahead, and though action does erupt somewhere past the midway point, it’s a salvage job on forced plotting. Forensic account investigator Bill Reed, an FBI agent trained in proving fraud, retires and opens his own far more lively fraud-investigation agency. Reed loses a leg in a Manhattan motorcycle accident on page one, then spends six months depressed, drinking, and letting his staff run his agency while he adjusts to various prosthetics. Then he gets a mysterious letter filled with numbers. It’s supposedly from his cousin, John Boyd Reed, a Down’s syndrome patient at the upstate Ullmann Institute. Alerted that something fishy is going on, Bill drives up to the Institute, forces his way in to his cousin’s bedside. Clarkson (New Lots, 1998, etc.) lines up his heavies, hospital helpers who brutalize John, and slathers on hints that fists and bullets will fly. While unctuous villain Mathew Ullmann alludes and alludes to criminal activity at his institute while talking with his wife, passing these allusions on to the hero puts Clarkson at an impasse. Reed can only intuit fraud and become engaged as an investigator after being roughed up by four hospital thugs, though he defends himself well with his crutch. One wonders what Reed is up to when he orders his best staff member to send him his guns and laptop. Now heavily armed and with a big sidekick as backup, Reed wades into . . . his laptop, setting in motion a complete investigation of Ullmann’s finances. To be sure, plenty of aggression takes place in later chapters, but Clarkson only goes through the motions. The story’s true interest lies in fraud investigation, not bullets.
Well researched, but this time Clarkson might better have taken a page from James M. Cain’s insurance classic, Double Indemnity. Waspish words grip where bullets only thud.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87886-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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