A suspenseful—and topical—tale of White House intrigue.
A debut political thriller tracks the meteoric and perilous rise of a Latina U.S. president.
Isabel Aragon “Tenny” Tennyson hails from a prominent Mexican family that owns and operates Groupo Aragon, a sprawling corporate conglomerate. Her brother Federico, groomed his whole life to take over the business, suddenly decides to become a Jesuit priest, leaving Tenny to eventually assume the reins. But Federico reveals to her that their family’s treasure has been conjured from blood and misdeeds, a vast criminal conspiracy that collaborates with drug cartels and autocratic governments. Tenny attempts to reform the company but is blocked by its corrupt gatekeepers. She moves to the United States, flush with a massive inheritance, and parlays her resources into political activism. She displays a knack for political theater and quickly becomes a powerful player in Washington, D.C. She runs for Congress and wins on the first try and then becomes a senator next, positioning herself as a champion of the disenfranchised. And when the Democratic candidate for president is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, she is tapped to take his place and becomes the first Hispanic, and first female, president in American history. She successfully pushes for sweeping immigration reform and tackles not only corruption in the financial sector, but ambitiously aims for a sea change in the very structure of American capitalism as well: “The whole financial system’s rotten and it’s rotting the political system. We’ve got to get control of it before it tears the country apart.” But dark forces with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo gather to oppose her and threaten her life. Rothstein has written a timely novel that artfully exploits contentious debate about immigration and oligarchic exploitation. The story is panoramic in scope and charts generations of the Aragon family, making this an unusually deep plot for a political thriller (Tenny’s ancestors include the Duke of Aragon, whose wife, Queen Isabella I of Spain, financed Columbus; “Aragons sailed to the New World with the conquistadors and built a legacy of economic and political power in Mexico”). Sometimes, the action flirts with implausibility, and Tenny is peculiarly successful—and with breakneck speed—for someone so idealistic. But she remains an enthralling protagonist at the heart of a gripping tale.
A suspenseful—and topical—tale of White House intrigue.Pub Date: July 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9976999-0-6
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Gold Standard Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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