Looking for some relief from the omnipresent headlines about Theodore Kaczynski, Oklahoma City, and the World Trade Center plot? You won't find it in this Mad Bomber tale, which cleverly draws on all these stories and more. A couple of years after an amateurish package of gelignite disfigures his right hand and gets him pensioned off from the NYPD's bomb disposal unit, ex-Sgt. Will Harper drops in on Jimmy Fahey, the former acolyte who swapped the tension of disarming explosive devices—he was on the scene when Harper got blasted into retirement—for a cushy job running security ops for paranoid, successful thriller author Rod Buckner. Buckner's convinced against all reason that he needs state-of-the-art protection, but none of it protects him against a bomb that goes off just as Harper is leaving the neighborhood. A close shave for Harper—but Harold Addleman, whose alcoholism got him kicked off the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, is convinced that it's much more besides: It's the work of a serial bomber with a taste for famous targets, like tennis player Tim Sothern and Congresswoman Susan Burton Wylie, and a truly scary ability to learn from his own mistakes. Working with Addleman, Harper painstakingly reconstructs a pattern of 22 deaths he can lay to the Celebrity Bomber, and predicts that the 23rd will be blowhard radio commentator Speed Rogers. But all his warnings aren't enough to get through to megalomaniac Rogers or his high-powered, clueless staff (a bit of partisan malice makes this episode especially stinging), and the bomber chalks up another victory and prepares for his climactic strike in Washington, D.C., home to more famous people than Harper, despite his newfound credibility, can possibly protect. The cat-and-mouse game is expertly routine. But veteran Lutz (Oops!, p. 22, etc.) and pseudonymous August shine in dramatizing the up-and-down power of Harper's own dubious celebrity, which makes him a target for a dozen agendas besides the bomber's.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-57566-259-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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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