A fun-size adventure tale that may not fill readers up but will taste just fine going down.
In this first novella from short story writer Tuggle, an intrepid archaeologist races to find an ancient emperor’s prized knife before it falls into the hands of an odious drug-cartel leader.
Deep inside El Tepozteco, an Aztec temple dedicated to the god of pulque (“the precursor of tequila”), Emperor Ahuitzotl long ago hid his beloved obsidian knife, which was rumored to have “sent 20,000 souls to the Aztec sun god.” At least, that’s what Dr. Jonathan Barrett deduces after poring over an ancient codex inside Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Barrett, a University of Texas at Austin archaeology professor specializing in pre-Columbian weapons, arrived in Mexico promising his wife a relaxing vacation in the city of Cuernavaca. They’re just another “middle-aged gringo couple on vacation,” Barrett muses—which provides him with the perfect cover to secretly track down the artifact for the U.S. State Department. But he soon realizes the American government is only one among several powerful organizations who’ve set their sights on Ahuitzoltl’s knife, including the Mexican government, a Mexican drug cartel and even some vigilantes waging war against the cartel. When the drug dealers suspect that Barrett has the blade, they kidnap his wife and tell him that she won’t be harmed, so long as the knife is theirs by midnight. Thus begins an odyssey that finds Barrett interrogated by mysterious masked men and later stuck inside a Mexican prison. Tuggle ably captures the spirit of Dan Brown novels and Indiana Jones–style adventure stories in this tale, as he surrounds his Aztec-treasure MacGuffin with just enough intrigue to keep readers engaged. The book’s brief length doesn’t hurt; it zips right along from twist to twist, eventually arriving at a bloody finale reminiscent of the film Taken (2008). At times, however, that same brevity works against the story—the final plot point, for example, feels particularly tacked-on. But, despite this, Tuggle manages to squeeze in enough character and plot developments that the occasional missteps don’t bring the proceedings to a halt.
A fun-size adventure tale that may not fill readers up but will taste just fine going down.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: The Novel Fox, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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