An audacious crusade from a hero (and his friends) with chops.
A New Orleans PI faces off against a crime boss and a drug-smuggling ring in Corona’s debut crime thriller.
When college student Billy Brewer dies from an overdose of 25i, a new synthetic drug flooding New Orleans’ streets, mom Nancy calls her brother, David Fournette, a former New Orleans cop now working as a PI. Finding the supplier is easy, but stopping him proves much harder: He’s Jim Marasco, son of Tony, a criminal with powerful connections. An all-too-convenient car accident takes care of Billy’s friend—and potential witness—John, but it seems that the bad guys have also targeted David when someone abducts his 14-year-old son, Tim. David and FBI pal Alan Smith, along with a helping hand from the FBI, are determined to put a stop to Tony by intercepting his legit importing business, an apparent front for smuggling 25i. Despite David’s private-eye status, the author’s novel isn’t much of a detective story. David’s involvement in the case, regarding both his nephew’s death and son’s kidnapping, is personal, and he gets an abundance of info and assistance from the feds and even an off-duty cop, Mark Harris. While readers hoping to trail a gumshoe scrutinizing clues will be disappointed, the book excels as a crime novel, especially in its thorough coverage of the villains. Tony, recognizing Jim as an unwanted agitator, tries to keep him out of trouble by sending him to Italy, where Tony gets his 25i; Jim is, predictably, no less a complication, his eye on Bella, wife to Tony’s Italian partner, Franco Romano. And Tony verifies that he is the most menacing of all lawbreakers—at least in New Orleans—when another gangster who may help police tie John’s murder to the crime boss winds up with a bullet in his head. The biblical analogy implied by the title doesn’t exactly apply: David is certainly up against a Goliath, but having the FBI at his disposal gives him much more than the proverbial stone. Still, his fight is both noble and courageous, traits befitting a worthy hero. A sequel will hopefully see him put his investigative noggin to the test.
An audacious crusade from a hero (and his friends) with chops.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490547244
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
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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