Sluggish pacing, inept contrivances and strident soap-boxing make this sink like a stone.
Terrorists descend on Arizona in search of a holy relic in an overly ambitious thriller that traverses its way through the centuries.
When swarthy men case her family’s house, attempt to set off a Pepsi-can bomb and try to kidnap her at gunpoint, Tucson teen Madeline Anthony-Pratt wonders why–but doesn’t notify her parents or the police. Could it have something to do with simultaneous Islamist uprisings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia? Or with her sister Brittany’s efforts to get her Muslim boyfriend released from Guantanamo Bay? Or, perhaps, with a mysterious pendant that has been in the family for generations, which–it transpires through much laborious exposition–contains a black stone frivolously chipped from Allah’s shrine in Mecca by Cleopatra herself? Yes, sort of…but much less than readers have a right to expect after all the ominous buildup. Cargill (To Follow the Goddess, 1991, etc.) fills in centuries of the titular rock’s back story, replete with tedious details of the Arab assassins sent to retrieve it and the clued-in alarmists who vainly attempt to key in the authorities to the menace they pose. One of the book’s few bright spots is Cargill’s portrait of a bluff, rational Julius Caesar cheerfully tuning out his aide’s nagging about the black stone. In the end, though, the bloated, Byzantine black-stone conspiracy proves oddly irrelevant to the plot’s apocalyptic climax. Cargill’s depiction of the age-old Arab menace does, however, lead to an obtrusive argument against American withdrawal from Iraq: “More than 80 percent of the American numskulls out there want to negotiate with the terrorists, bring the troops back home, and flee back to their jacuzzis and swimming pools in suburban New York and Los Angeles,” shrills one character. The pontificating is developed with briefs declaring congressional attempts to withhold war funding as unconstitutional. Thinly disguised caricatures of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore are ridiculed, while a John McCain-esque Arizona senator saves the day.
Sluggish pacing, inept contrivances and strident soap-boxing make this sink like a stone.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-979-8904-1-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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