by Luisella Levi Garlick ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 12, 2013
Readers should delight in the characters’ budding romance and the international locales.
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The author’s debut adventure novel follows a woman’s global trek as she stumbles on romance, an inherited fortune and a scheme to steal a painting.
Canadian restaurant consultant Claudia flies to Geneva to pay respects to her late and much beloved uncle Renato. She’s happy to be included in the will, receiving the bulk of her uncle’s wealth, but she soon spots a blonde woman following her, and someone else ransacks Renato’s apartment, as well as her home back in Canada. It isn’t long before she’s accosted. Evidently, some dodgy individuals want her final gift from Renato—a painting that doesn’t seem to have much value. There are allusions to espionage in Levi Garlick’s book: Claudia’s friend and business partner, Suzy, makes a couple of James Bond references, and Claudia’s love interest, Michael, is a British MI5 agent. But the story dwells more on romance than investigating terrorists. In that regard, Michael’s charms and good looks are touted a bit excessively. It’s obvious well before he meets Claudia that they’ll become a couple. But Levi Garlick develops their relationship solidly. They don’t immediately hop into bed, and the British agent is steadfastly professional in keeping his new love safe, especially after their meeting on the street leads to a kidnapping and a hail of bullets. One of the novel’s most notable assets is the cultivation of Claudia’s paranoia; looted rooms are simply “weird,” but ultimately, she thinks people are trailing or watching her, and she’s often panicky when she wakes up alone. A palpable threat makes her paranoia reasonable: A man who’s eluded Interpol in nonextradition France easily finds her in other countries, including Italy and the U.K. A first-rate subplot—her uncle’s journal, set around World War II, reveals where Renato’s love of art may have originated—enhances the story, as does the occasional humor: Claudia’s pounding chicken while prepping for dinner sends Scotland Yard’s Gael scurrying into the room with gun drawn.
Readers should delight in the characters’ budding romance and the international locales.Pub Date: April 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481966320
Page Count: 444
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
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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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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