Admirably ambitious and with a terrorist plot that isn’t the same old, same old.
A devastating terrorist bombing in Paris sparks a joint French-American investigation with conflicting methods and agendas in this debut thriller.
McGuire instantly sets an indelibly grisly and chaotic scene: the aftermath of two savage explosions—several minutes apart—of unprecedented magnitude. Enter Christine Dupont, who works for the French version of the FBI and CIA combined. But the CIA wants in on the investigation. “We have an interest here too,” she is told. “We can stay in the background, but we would like to be closely involved.” As the investigation progresses, the author shifts perspectives among the story’s good and bad actors. Among the former is 29-year-old Doyle O’Gara, who has just started a job in the Washington office of a security firm and is “excited to be joining the fight, no matter how small or peripheral his role might turn out to be.” Among the latter is Mohammed Jamal, who is portrayed with more depth than the usual villain in such cases. (“He had not intended there to be so many bodies.”) Terrorist plots and the race against time to foil possible imminent attacks are at this point reliable tropes for action fans, but McGuire heightens suspense by juggling several timelines. Chapters are subtitled “Six months before the attack,” “First day of the investigation,” “One month after the Paris attack,” and so on. O’Gara’s character gets muddied as the story progresses. He is dismissed at one point as “a marginal character, a techie.” But at another point, he himself reflects how his company duties “had been growing, rather rapidly it had seemed to him at the time.” Things aren’t made any clearer by this sentence: “He had not foreseen that he would play such a central role, albeit a minor one, in the investigation that swiftly followed.” Readers may either be disappointed or impressed by how the author subverts expectations for Jack Ryan–like heroics. Dupont, though, has the right stuff to carry a franchise of espionage adventures.
Admirably ambitious and with a terrorist plot that isn’t the same old, same old.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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