Delightfully meaty and thrilling; a perfect escape that promises more action and intrigue to come.
A suspense novel injects technological and conspiracy elements into a dark plot.
It’s clear from the start that this isn’t just a random San Francisco Bay Area slaying. Dwight Beauchamp’s missing heart and the three unrelated bodies in the same condition would be enough for a federal investigation. But Dwight’s role as an extraordinarily talented hacker, tasked with the security of the new national power system called the Smart Grid, raises far more red flags. FBI Special Agents Alvaro Cruz and Mitchell Hastings are tasked with probing the murder, but the facts of the case don’t seem to line up with any ritual or serial killings they’ve encountered. Dwight’s paranoia in the weeks before his death point to a specific threat, but few knew of his involvement with the Smart Grid and the other victims offer no new leads. Because the U.S. president will soon arrive in California to bring the grid online, Cruz and Hastings rush to find a witness who may be able to make sense of what’s going on. And lurking in the shadows is a conspiracy steeped in sacrifice, belief, and revenge, hundreds of years in the making. More than murder, this may be a bloody, terrible menace the likes of which the world has never seen. The prose is tightly written and well-paced, even given the substantial length of the novel (close to 600 pages). What’s more, the details of the mystery and the story are surprisingly understandable and well-explained, though there’s plenty of information to ingest from the crime-solving team, the tech industry, and even the legacy of the ancient Aztec civilization. The characters may be mostly rote and archetypal, but they don’t detract from Smith’s (Choices, 2013) taut tale that much. Readers will likely be so enticed by the plot that they won’t really notice. The main question with this sort of story is whether it keeps the pages turning and the readers guessing, and if it can avoid getting bogged down in dreary exposition. By those metrics, this series opener passes with flying colors.
Delightfully meaty and thrilling; a perfect escape that promises more action and intrigue to come.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 607
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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