British spymasters use high finance to bring low a villainous arms-dealer in another slick thriller from Davies (Nest of Vipers, 1994). Recruited by M16 after graduating from Oxford, drop-dead beauty Eva Cunningham proves a whiz at undercover work in the Far East. Playing her role too well, Eva becomes a heroin addict to infiltrate a drug ring run as a sideline by Robie Frazer, a wealthy English businessman whose stock in trade is selling secret weapons systems to China. When Frazer betrays a friend of Eva's to the Singapore police, she's brought in from the cold for detox. Four years on, vengeful Eva is summoned home again by the SIS for an all-out campaign against Frazer, who (mindful of Hong Kong's 1997 handover) is also sojourning in London. With help from fellow Oxonian Cassie Stewart, a lissome merchant banker who doesn't know her chum is on the intelligence game, Eva lures the corrupt taipan into a risky deal involving a Vietnamese diamond mine. She also beds him, to the consternation of her M16 controller, Andrew Stormont, whose brief is anti-proliferation. While Cassie sets up funding for what she believes is a legitimate project through the raffish Vancouver Stock Exchange, Eva and Frazer have at one another in the boardroom as well as boudoir. Eva's luck runs out when an assassin imported by Frazer to terminate a recalcitrant informant recognizes her as a former mule. Frazer whisks his faithless lover off to Hanoi, and Cassie follows hard on their heels. Having learned Frazer has a cunning plan to use ore samples to distribute narcotics, les girls find themselves in mortal peril. By no means overmatched, the resourceful Eva engineers a daring escape and returns to the scene of Frazer's crimes to even the score. An immensely entertaining fiscal thriller notable for its exotic venues, though one that draws precious few distinctions between the good guys and bad. (First printing of 50,000; Literary Guild selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-48038-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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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