Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.
Revenge is the order of the day in this action-packed Gray Man thriller.
That freelance assassin Court Gentry has enemies shocks no one. Code-named Violator in his CIA days, he has since become the Gray Man, so elusive that some think him a myth. He’s not complicated: “If I’ve got pants on, I’ve got a gun on,” he describes himself succinctly. In this episode, everybody wants something. James Westwood wants to be senator and eventually president, and isn’t above committing treason to get there. Two fearsome killers, each with his own agenda, want Gentry dead. Gentry himself wants to get to Russia for contract work, but first he must get out of Bulgaria, where he kills Northern Irish criminal Charlie Coyle in a gunfight. Hyperline Level IIIA body armor saves Gentry’s life in that encounter, but now he must face Charlie’s dad, Campbell Coyle, whose “one singular objective in life” is to come to America and cut a bloody swath to exact deadly revenge on “the man who had murdered his son.” The elder Coyle is a “bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.” Yet he understands how much he and the Gray Man have in common, that they are both “God’s living proof” that humans have not progressed in 800 years. There’s also Lancer, a dangerous former Navy SEAL turned assassin who says that “Court Gentry is the man who put me in prison in Cuba, and he’s gonna pay.” Meanwhile, series regular Zack Hightower spies on his biological daughter. He means no harm but simply wants to know that she’s well, but what follows is one damn thing after another. At first it looks like a separate plot line, but everything comes back to the Gray Man. The story is nearly 500 pages of gunfire, explosions, a spring-loaded wrist stiletto, treason, vengeance, blood, bodies, and a teenage girl who loves her adoptive father and doesn’t know bio dad even exists.
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593954812
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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