A noteworthy, delightful tale of a deceptively complicated plan unraveling.
In Dupont’s debut thriller, miners want to hold onto gold they discover, but when others want a cut, it leads to kidnapping and death.
Mining supervisor Joe McDonald initially isn’t sure what to do with the gold vein that his son, Rod, stumbled upon in a Red Lake, Ontario, mine. But when the manager of mining company Knoxgold tells him that they’ll be cutting bonuses for workers, Joe makes a decision, and he, Rod, and Joe’s nephew, Simon, covertly extract the gold that they feel the company owes them. After Joe is injured by an accidental explosion in the mine, he’s forced to bring in Mat Montgomery, an industrial photographer and former miner. Joe must also find someone to process the ore and a buyer who won’t ask too many questions about the gold’s origins. He and his group keep mineralogist Jake Vance largely in the dark, but when Jake realizes the illegitimacy of the gold’s source, he quickly renegotiates his fee. Joe and his friends are suddenly faced with a dwindling cache and are forced to deal with a shady South American gold trader—as well as a pesky neighbor complaining of morning explosions. The group retains a firm grip on its profits, but when people end up dead and a surprise kidnapping occurs, it becomes clear that the men will be lucky just to stay alive. The novel painstakingly details the process as the original trio take out the gold, which provides a notable precursor to the ultimate collapse of the careful scheme. Joe, a widower, is smart and charming enough to make readers forget that he’s a thief. His love interest, office manager Kate Morrison, however, is a bit thin; she forgoes a payout so long as Joe supports her financially. Dupont drops in a few impressive shockers, including character deaths, none of which are murders. Some of the obstacles the group faces are refreshingly unexpected; at one point, for example, the miners must retrieve a corpse floating in open water so that its discovery won’t lead someone to a nearby stash of gold. The ending wraps up everything in a nice bow, but Dupont makes it abundantly clear that greed doesn’t lead to a happy resolution for everyone.
A noteworthy, delightful tale of a deceptively complicated plan unraveling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
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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