A first-rate introduction to energetic characters, with potential for future developments.
Years after surviving illness and tragedy, a former fixer for the Mafia becomes a target of the Russian mob in Rothman’s (Dispocalypse, 2016, etc.) thriller.
Levi Yoder gets devastating news: he has stage 4 pancreatic cancer and won’t live much longer, even with treatment. Then he makes contact with a strange, golden crosslike object that someone anonymously sent his wife, Mary, and his cancer disappears. Unfortunately, Mary dies in a car accident soon thereafter, so a despondent Levi decides to travels the world. For more than a decade, he lives in various countries, including Japan, where he studies martial arts, before finally returning to the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, farm where he spent the first 18 years of his life with his Amish family. At the same time, CIA agent Madison Lewis, while monitoring Russian phone lines, overhears a conversation that sounds like it’s referring to a planned killing on U.S. soil. She also believes that the Russians are linked to the disappearance of some American nuclear bombs decades ago. Then an assassin ends up murdering two of Levi’s friends, and so Levi becomes determined to track him down. He meets a man dressed as a Buddhist monk named Amar Van, who says that Levi possesses special gifts other than fighting prowess, including the ability to heal faster than normal. These skills may prove necessary, as he and Madison face a powerful and lethal villain. Rothman constructs dynamic characters in this methodically paced novel, devoting copious pages to Levi’s globe-trekking adventure. The author reveals Madison’s pre-CIA life as a Navy diver, and Levi’s back story is likewise engrossing: he was once a fixer, working in the “gray-area of the law,” most often for his Mafia-connected pals. There are subtle hints that Levi’s and Madison’s lives will intersect over the course of the novel, but when they inevitably do, the ensuing romance feels a bit rushed. Although fisticuffs are on full display in the action scenes, the protagonist’s other abilities remain largely ambiguous. Nevertheless, it’s abundantly clear that Levi is still learning; he apparently has an eidetic memory, for example, which he’s only recently acknowledged. Perhaps these skills, and Levi and Madison’s romance, will be further expanded upon in a sequel.
A first-rate introduction to energetic characters, with potential for future developments.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 484
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2018
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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