Lawton’s brooding, sophisticated prose effectively captures a troubled era. Peopled by flawed adults struggling to know and...
A Cold War thriller that bids fair to catapult its author (Black Out, 1995) into le Carré/Furst territory.
It’s 1956. Chief Inspector Frederick Troy, of Scotland Yard, has the unenviable assignment of shepherding and translating for Nikita Khrushchev and his entire entourage during their visit to London. Troy, who emigrated to England from the Soviet Union as a child, can’t shake off memories of his WWII espionage assignments or the cruel suspicion that his father was a spy and traitor. Though Winston Churchill makes an amusing cameo, shuffling by Troy with the words “Harumgrrum werrumbrum,” the Khrushchev visit is mostly just a curtain-raiser for the main mystery that kicks off when a navy diver’s mutilated body is found in Portsmouth Harbour. Evidence indicates that it’s retired Lieutenant Arnold Cockerell. Cockerell’s wife insists that the corpse isn’t her husband’s, though she can’t explain his apparent disappearance. When it’s determined that Cockerell is, or was, a spy, the mystery deepens beyond identification of the body. Which side was he working for? The case turns out to have more layers than an onion. There’ll be additional victims, a duplicitous mistress, and the shadow of Khrushchev looming over everyone. Throughout it all, Troy’s personal life provides considerable distraction and enrichment. His dangerous old flame, a former KGB agent named Larissa Tosca, appears unannounced on his doorstep. (How dangerous is she? Lawton provides an early glimpse of her seducing an enemy, then breaking his member.) His wild sister Sasha needs constant monitoring, and his bourgeois-assimilated brother Rod abhors Troy’s involvement in a case with so many echoes of their past.
Lawton’s brooding, sophisticated prose effectively captures a troubled era. Peopled by flawed adults struggling to know and act on the truth in a time of moral turmoil, Old Flames is unforgettable.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-864-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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