A lively international, and otherworldly, adventure.
An action-packed SF thriller-series installment concerning international relations on Earth and extraterrestrial contact.
In this follow-up to Thunderbird Rising (2024), Maxx King and his girlfriend Gabby Fisher are having coffee in Seattle. The year is 2002 and the United States is still reeling from the attacks of September 11, 2001. Gabby and Maxx are set to meet with Connie Xi, the daughter of a high-level Chinese scientist. Their goal is to get the elder Dr. Xi to cooperate with the U.S. government on a secret project, but before anything can be arranged, assassins shoot Connie in broad daylight. As it turns out, the project, known as Thunderbird, is named after an alien communication device, and the events of 9/11, during which Maxx was injured, were connected to a conflict between China and the U.S. over who would activate the device first. Afghanistan was invaded, according to this novel’s version of historical events, due to its proximity to China’s western border, and the American government bulked up its military based on instructions from the aliens. Ideally, the two Earth superpowers would find a way to work together in common cause because, as U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney points out, “Our national security and possibly the fate of the planet are dangling by a thin thread.” However, even this dire state of affairs does not make cooperation easy, as the different players in this game have very different goals—with some of them more ill-intentioned than others.
This sequel’s intricate setup throws a lot of information at readers very quickly. Indeed, the historical background and the intricacies of alien communication make for dense exposition as the novel recaps events of the first book. Nevertheless, the combination of alien-SF with more conventional thriller material is intriguing. Likewise, the aliens are an interesting lot who don’t put much trust in humanity, for reasons that readers will find understandable: “It is your nature to deceive.” A revelation about midway through the story also indicates that the Earth-alien relationship is far more complex than one might initially expect. It’s clear that these advanced creatures are incredibly powerful—especially compared to humanity—and much of the excitement comes from suspense over what they’ll do next, especially after their plans to come to Earth are revealed. After all, the aliens “have been building worlds for millennia” and humankind’s “attempts at duplicity are well known” to them. The dialogue can be awkward at times, as when someone rather obviously says of Dr. Xi early on, after Connie is killed: “He is going to be emotionally distraught from the loss of his daughter yesterday, but you need to convince him that we must work together, or all is lost.” The book also sometimes relies on stock genre lines, such as “This is a dangerous game you are playing.” However, as the story progresses with locations ranging from Seattle to Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, to Kabul, it offers a welcome mix of alien and earthling hostilities.
A lively international, and otherworldly, adventure.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990672048
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2025
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
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.
Could making a movie about the disappearance of five women from an island reawaken an evil presence there?
Five dresses hang from the topmost limbs of an oak on a remote island in a Vermont lake. That memorable image marks a mystery from a century ago, when five women believed to have been part of a commune vanished forever. As this novel opens, another group gathers on the island to make a movie based on that tale. Marin Keane, the narrator, is surprised but thrilled to find herself cast as one of the leads; she’s a struggling actor whose biggest part so far has been “Bridesmaid with Eczema” in a drug commercial, so playing Daisy Rue, whose haunting diary is the basis for the movie’s script, could be a career-making move. Ronan Peters, the writer-director, is talented and, Marin notes, hot. His reason for gathering the cast on the island is a kind of boot-camp rehearsal: They’ll spend a week living there, wearing period clothes, and managing without internet or phone service. Oh, and holding séances. What could go wrong? Marin quickly meets the other women in the cast: regal character actor Julianne Brown, cool and competent Heather Benchley, bratty former Disney star Susie Hutchinson, and, striking awe in all of them, Violet Wright, a much-awarded Meryl Streep-ish figure who will play the woman who brought the others to the island, which she owned. They get to work, but soon enough someone disappears. The book’s plot, like the movie’s script, largely follows Daisy’s journal, and since the reader is supplied with pages-long sections of that journal, there’s not much suspense about what will happen next. There are some effective set pieces, such as the group’s first séance. But in its last quarter, the plot collapses into a muddle of #MeToo vengeance, improbable secrets, and jarring character reveals that is, as Marin says, “the most Scooby-Doo thing I’ve ever heard.”
This thriller’s eerie mood is deflated by a plot with more holes than a Halloween sheet.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798217044092
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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