Thriller aficionados will enjoy this one.
The middle entry in a trilogy of thrillers set in Spain, following Red Queen (2023).
In Madrid, Antonia Scott and her partner, Jon Gutiérrez, are key players in the EU's Red Queen project, designed to root out the very worst criminals. They pull a decomposed body from the banks of the Manzanares river. Then white-slave trafficker Yuri Voronin is murdered by the Russian mafia, and his pregnant wife, Lola Moreno, goes on the run. The chapters focusing on Lola's viewpoint tend to begin with a once-upon-a-time quality: “There was once a little girl who grew up in a sad, loveless home where the food tasted of ashes and the future was black.” It had taken marriage to a Russian mobster to find wealth and happiness—until death did them part, anyway. Aslan Orlov, aka the Beast, wants to find and kill Lola, so he calls in "Chernaya Volchista," the Black Wolf. (Hmm. Seems like if Spain wants big-league sleaze, they have to import it.) Scott and Gutiérrez want her, too, because “everything centers on finding Lola Moreno.” The bad guys are suitably frightening, and Scott and Gutiérrez are sympathetic protagonists. He's smart, strong, brave, and gay. She's the most intelligent person on the planet, and one of the quirkier protagonists in crime fiction. She’s afraid of almost nothing, hates to be touched, and relaxes for three minutes a day by imagining how she could kill herself. As with Red Queen, the action is intense, with blood flowing and dead bodies galore: Police find eight dead women who’d been locked in a shipping container—perhaps they once had been beautiful, but you couldn’t tell anymore. Just when it looks like all is done and dusted, something happens that screams for a sequel. One of several great lines: “a two-seater couch so close to the TV you could change channels with your eyelashes.”
Thriller aficionados will enjoy this one.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781250853691
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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