Mr. and Mrs. Middle America take it on the lam from an army of law enforcers when a routine check reveals that they’re high on the Most Wanted list. Fifteen years ago, newlyweds Jake and Carolyn Donovan worked for Enviro-Kleen, a firm whose scrubbing of a gas-laden army ammunition plant touched off what came to be known throughout the nation as the Newark Incident, a catastrophe that left all 16 of their co-workers dead and hundreds of square miles of the Arkansas countryside contaminated with radioactive waste. The sole survivors, the Donovans, were promptly branded ecoterrorists responsible for the holocaust, and promoted to the top of the FBI’s dance card. Only the money and help provided by the one-man Witness Protection Program run by Carolyn’s uncle, ruthless Chicago developer Harry Sinclair, allowed them to escape the feds and reemerge as Jake and Carolyn Brighton. Now, as they hustle their dazed son Travis, 13, out of his school and off to the storage locker they’ve had stocked with food and weapons and transport and new identity papers, they insist to the boy that they never did anything wrong; every scrap of evidence against them was planted. By now, readers of Gilstrap’s sizzling debut novel, Nathan’s Run (1996), will have realized that he’s recycled the same plot—the innocent on the run from massive, untrustworthy forces of authority—but pumped everything up (beginning by substituting an entire family for the solitary child) by making it bigger, faster, noisier, and longer. Especially longer. Before they’ve finally vindicated themselves—not a big surprise, since in scene after scene everybody gets shot but them—Jake and Carolyn have tracked the Newark Incident to the very highest levels of the government, and Gilstrap has ingeniously twisted his simple premise six ways from Sunday. Does for families what Nathan’s Run did for preteens—puts them through endless rounds of entertainingly action-packed pursuit. (Film rights to Arnold Kopelson)
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-446-52315-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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