The cardboard characters—especially Alana, whose relationship with Adam inspires not paranoia but mild impatience—seem to be...
Despite a killer first printing and advance sales to Hollywood and seven other foreign countries, Finder’s turn from Soviet spying to the corporate variety doesn’t reach the heights of High Crimes (1998).
Adam Cassidy doesn’t take his midlevel job at Wyatt Communications seriously enough to worry about what will happen if a harmless but expensive prank leads to his dismissal. But when he’s caught and confronted with the consequences, he sees that getting fired is the least of his problems. He’s looking at 20 years in jail unless he allows CEO Nicholas Wyatt and his hired guns—menacing security director Arnold Meacham and insinuating executive coach Judith Bolton—to groom him as a corporate spy. His manners refined and his résumé stuffed with impressive new lies, Adam interviews for a job with Wyatt’s competitor Trion Systems, where his combination of ignorance, luck, and brass—in Finder’s cleverest stroke—rockets him past his original boss, Dragon Lady Nora Sommers, her smilingly treacherous protégé Chad Pierson, and even Machiavellian Chief Financial Officer Paul (“Cutthroat”) Camilletti to the ultimate corridor of power: an office outside that of homespun founder/CEO Jock Goddard. Adam is resentful of the thugs pulling his strings back at Wyatt and beguiled by Goddard’s instant acceptance of him as a surrogate son—an interest his own troubled relationship with his dying father makes him happy to reciprocate. So he’s soon taking time off from spying on Goddard and Alana Jennings, the predecessor who’s moved over to the Disruptive Technologies Unit, to bond with the first and bed the second, all the while looking nervously over his shoulder.
The cardboard characters—especially Alana, whose relationship with Adam inspires not paranoia but mild impatience—seem to be waiting for the movie stars to fill them in and give them life in this upscale consumer fantasy (the Porsche! the haberdashery!) of industrial espionage.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31914-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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