A functional Vietnam-era thriller.
In this sequel, two American operatives discover an assassination plot.
Hawk and Cowboy, a pair of veteran snipers and best friends who recently served in Vietnam, are now working special missions for none other than the president of the United States. After tangling with some drug dealers in Mexico, the guys are back in Southeast Asia—in Laos, specifically, though they may have to sneak across borders. After an attempted jungle incursion leads to an ambush, Hawk suspects that they were set up, but by whom? The covert operations in which they are involved are all but anonymous: “No one in Laos kept any type of identification on them, so they had been given the collective ID of MACV-SOG team one. No names. They took turns being number one and number two. No one went by their right name in Laos.” They find out that their presence in the area is seen as a threat to the heroin trade operating out of the so-called “Golden Triangle,” in which the CIA is heavily involved. While on an assassination mission, Hawk and Cowboy uncover a plan to eliminate the top CIA official in the region—a scheme to be carried out by an elite Cuban sniper who has come to Asia to kill Americans. With the help of an old friend from their Mexican adventures named Liz, Hawk and Cowboy seek to protect U.S. interests, but they may have finally met their match in the form of this mysterious Cuban sniper. Shellenbergar’s (Recover and Terminate, 2018) prose is muscular and exact, demonstrating a persuasive grasp of the particulars of military life and jungle operations. He is adept at writing combat scenes without losing readers in all the commotion: “When the grenades blew and the wounded started yelling, a lone NVA came running from the jungle toward Hawk, his SKS level and firing. He was missing each shot as he ran toward Hawk. The enemy’s bayonet was pointed at Hawk’s chest.” The characters are a bit clichéd and the plot is more than a little ridiculous, but the author has managed to vividly reproduce the tone and set pieces of a 1980s action movie in novel form.
A functional Vietnam-era thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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