John Worthington “J.W.” Mayfair used to fly bombing missions during the Vietnam War, and now he’s the vice president of a...
In this debut thriller based upon a real-life 1996 plane crash, a young man must uphold his family’s honor while also facing ethical challenges posed by terrorists and the U.S. government.
John Worthington “J.W.” Mayfair used to fly bombing missions during the Vietnam War, and now he’s the vice president of a software company. As he leaves New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport for a business meeting in Paris, he decides to call Liam, his estranged son, from the plane. While he leaves his message of reconciliation, however, he sees a surface-to-air missile launch from a nearby oil tanker, and his plane, TWA Flight 800, is blown from the sky. Authorities eventually rule that the tragedy was simply the result of a short circuit. Two years later, Liam, who never got J.W.’s message, still has nightmares about his father’s death, and his own life seems adrift and aimless. His mother, however, wants him to become involved in her planned lawsuit against TWA for negligence. Then Liam finally hears the answering machine message he missed so long ago, and he realizes that it could prove that terrorists attacked the plane. If he reveals the message to others, however, his mother’s potential financial windfall could vanish. Liam’s situation worsens when shady figures start gunning for him and anyone else capable of challenging the “short circuit” theory. Debut author Picciano delivers a meticulously crafted thriller packed with details that re-create the Flight 800 tragedy all too well: “The sea was covered with floating corpses…and the bizarre coating of gold glitter which had been blown out of boxes and now covered the hair and clothing and faces of the dead.” However, the story’s main strength is the author’s finely tuned characterization. For example, Liam, unlike his overachieving brothers, is described as being “like the boy who suddenly realizes that the only way he can see the hidden tiger in the 3-D image is...by simply relaxing and allowing it to reveal itself.” Sometimes the author’s colorful imagery fails, however, such as when Flight 800 is callously compared to a “Chinese firecracker.” Such a description makes the gravitas that Flight 800 brings to the narrative feel unearned. The novel could have entertained readers just as well by using a fictional tragedy. A page-turning thriller debut but one that overreaches by pulling straight from the headlines.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Page Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2014
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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