The science stuff is terrific, though the paranoia level is lower than old Bob’s.
Fifth entry in the Ludlum fiction factory’s Covert-One series, this time from notes fleshed out by historical novelist Larkin (Passing Judgment, 1996, etc.).
Again on hand is Colonel Jon Smith, M.D., specialist in infectious diseases who chases down bad bugs meant to destroy large populations when delivered by a typical Ludlum terrorist group intent on taking over very large sections of the world. Smith works for Covert-One, the president’s personal secret intelligence agency, although this time out Jon says he’s on detached duty with the Pentagon. The big terrorist baddie now is the Lazarus Movement, an environmentalist group hijacked by a monster intent on—guess what?—wiping out most of the world and rising from the dead to rule the remainder living. How to go about this? It seems that the Teller Institute, which the president will visit in three days to lend his support to medical research underway there, has developed nanophages, supertiny organisms about the size of ten atoms that can zip about a sick body and take out cancer cells, or any other infected cells. Alas, when five cancerous mice are injected with the nanophages, four survive but the fifth shrivels. Now, if someone could isolate the shriveling agent in a nanophage, he’d have the world’s most deadly biological weapon. A top Japanese scientist on the project has disappeared. The Lazarus Movement swells gigantically when a Zimbabwe village is wiped out, with the massacre attributed to the US. Now the Lazarus Movement, misled by the novel’s chief villain, invades the Teller Institute, where Jon Smith is working: nanophage bombs blow up, and 2,000 demonstrators are killed, along with many scientists and security folk. As it happens, the disguised villain has built three flying wings to act as drones and drop nanophage bombs that will deplete the world’s oversupply of humans. Only Jon Smith can save us.
The science stuff is terrific, though the paranoia level is lower than old Bob’s.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31679-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It may be time for Silva's hero to retire from the field and let his protégés take over.
Gabriel Allon partners with a dubious ally in the Middle East.
When a 12-year-old is abducted from an exclusive private school in Geneva, Allon, head of Israeli intelligence, is among the first to know. The girl’s father is Khalid bin Mohammed, heir to the Saudi throne, and he wants Allon’s help. KBM was once feted as a reformer, ready to bring new industries and new freedoms to his country. When he makes his appeal to Allon, though, KBM is the prime suspect in the murder of a journalist. If KBM immediately makes you think of MBS, you are correct. Silva mentions Mohammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s real-life heir apparent, in a foreword. But anyone who recognizes KBM as a fictional echo of MBS might find this book to be more old news than fresh entertainment. In his last few novels, Silva has turned his attention to current world affairs, such as the rise of the new Russia and the threats of global terrorism. In novels like The Other Woman (2018) and House of Spies (2017), the author was inventive enough that these works felt compelling and original. And, in The Black Widow (2016), Silva wrote much of the story from the point of view of the French-born Israeli doctor Allon recruited for an undercover mission while also expanding the roles of a few familiar secondary characters. Allon is a wonderful creation. In the first several novels in this series, he posed as an art restorer while working for Israel’s intelligence service. He adopted a variety of personas and gave readers access to people and places few of us will ever see. Now that he’s a public figure who can no longer invent alter egos, his world is smaller and less fascinating. The pacing here is slow, and any sense of urgency is undercut by the matter of what’s at stake. Ultimately, this is a narrative about removing one horrible Saudi ruler in order to reinstate a less horrible Saudi ruler. This might be solid realpolitik, but it’s not terribly compelling fiction.
It may be time for Silva's hero to retire from the field and let his protégés take over.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283483-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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