It’s a thin line between murder and war in this splendid contribution to the body of fiction written about Vietnam.
In this stellar second outing from Jurjevics (The Trudeau Vector, 2005) Erik Rider, Army CID special agent, flies to Vietnam’s Phu Bon on orders to investigate and disrupt a narcotics ring operating amid the legal and moral turpitude of the Vietnam conflict.
The Vietnamese army is understandably reluctant to engage their Viet Cong adversaries, let alone whoever is producing and smuggling out opium and marijuana with the help of indigenous tribes from the forbidding highlands and funneling profits to the communists, corrupt Vietnamese officials and possibly even an American civilian. Corruption and graft are rife, even in the ranks of the anti-corruption task force, so Rider and CIA cohort John Ruchevsky run missions sub rosa, uncovering a tangled net of influence, secret deals and kickback. Jurjevic’s ’Nam seethes with conflicted loyalties and the desperation of a nation and indigenous peoples still reeling from French imperialism suddenly forced to play host to a de facto war. To the enlisted men, Vietnam is paradise and hell; to the indigenous tribes like the Montagnards and to the Vietnamese, it’s a caldera of conflict that Jurjevics depicts with an anthropologist’s eye for customs and interrelationships. The drama is vast and intricate: missionaries, mercenaries, soldiers and aid workers with differing aims but united in their need to survive in the face of a highly organized enemy who, Rider discovers, knows the foe’s radio frequencies and has an uncanny precognition of airstrikes. Only when Ruchevsky and Rider have some success destroying an opium field do they realize the depths of their enemy’s infiltration into their ranks and ruthlessness when it comes to reprisals. And, because the war is not officially a war, their hands are further tied by diplomatic immunity and the U.S. government’s reluctance to compromise classified information or favorable relations with their allies. This tight-wound thriller drips with historical detail in all its cruelty, portraying with hard-boiled realism a conflict where neither side balked at intimidation and torture, and where human life was often just collateral.
It’s a thin line between murder and war in this splendid contribution to the body of fiction written about Vietnam.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-56451-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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