An exhilarating spy novel that offers equal amounts of ingenuity and intrigue.
In Bond’s (Killing Maine, 2015, etc.) latest thriller, an intelligence operative spends decades immersed in America’s struggle with Islamic terrorists.
Jack is on a CIA mission in Afghanistan in 1982 to aid the Afghan opposition to Soviet invaders. But he has a personal investment, too: under his previous cover as a Peace Corps volunteer, he’d taught kids at a local village and became a blood brother to teacher Ahmad. The Americans supply the Afghans with missiles to take down Soviet helicopters, but later, after alliances shift, the CIA works to prevent a truce between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. When the Islamic Jihad terrorist group bombs the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the agency sends Jack to Lebanon to gather intel. What he learns is staggering: the bombing was reputedly in retaliation for the American bombardment of Beirut villages—which was itself retribution for the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon earlier that year. As the years pass, Jack gets involved with Sophie Dassault, who’d saved his life while she was working for Doctors without Borders. But he can’t escape the cycle of violence; in 1986, he travels to Paris to stop an Algerian terrorist that he’d once trained. The American government, meanwhile, may be helping certain terrorist groups by allowing them to thrive unchecked. Bond’s epic novel is packed with historical references, including a mention of Osama bin Laden long before the events of 9/11; an opening prologue set in 2015 ensures that the narrative spans more than 30 years. Overall, the story maintains a provocative, intelligent tone rather than indulging in garish conspiracies—despite its allusions to nefarious deeds by various presidential administrations. Jack himself is the true focus of the narrative, and Bond shows how he blames himself for the violence as much as he does the higher-ups; he sums it up best by saying, “We’re just boys playing war.” Other characters, from a Soviet officer to an Afghan warlord (who’s also Ahmad’s brother), provide perspective and steer the plot clear of easy definitions of good and evil. There’s also profundity at times, especially regarding the futility of vengeance; at one point, Jack even suggests that truly avenging someone is an impossible feat.
An exhilarating spy novel that offers equal amounts of ingenuity and intrigue.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62704-035-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Mandevilla Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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