by Kurt Kamm ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2011
An assured, very memorable LA thriller, with an appealing hero readers will want to meet again.
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A disturbing fictional trip to the dark underside of Los Angeles life.
When Los Angeles County Fire paramedic Colt Lewis’ ambulance pulls up at the scene of a single-vehicle accident at the outset of Kamm’s (Hazardous Material, 2013, .etc) latest novel, he’s shocked to find a local policeman haplessly trying to help a semiconscious young woman whose leg has been badly mangled—and whose right foot is missing. Even after Lewis and his partner stabilize and load the young woman in their van, the foot—presumably severed at the scene—is nowhere to be found. The combination of that strange fact and the girl’s vulnerability triggers Lewis’ heroic impulses and sets into motion the bizarre quest at the heart of this leanly and effectively told noir novel about the dark byways of LA. “Don’t get emotionally involved with your patients,” Lewis is told. “If you start asking ‘what if’ it never stops.” But Lewis can’t help himself. He obsesses about the injured young woman, daydreaming about what her life was like before the accident. Soon he begins using his days off to investigate the missing foot, and this leads him into worlds of illegal medical labs, black-market bazaars of body parts and an entire crime ring that operates in the shadows. Kamm fills these worlds with a big cast of sharply drawn, odd characters, some merely eccentric but many others evil and predatory (Kamm skillfully dramatizes the day-to-day life of LA paramedics; there’s an excellent police procedural running alongside the more exotic plotlines here). Lewis’ expanding search forces him to examine his own motives, and Kamm expertly ratchets up the narrative tension, peeling back multiple layers of twisted mysteries. A tense, atmospheric climax in the tunnels under a sprawling university will keep readers turning pages right to the very satisfying conclusion.
An assured, very memorable LA thriller, with an appealing hero readers will want to meet again.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0979855139
Page Count: 233
Publisher: MCM Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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