Served up with explicit gore that is not for the faint-hearted, but even more haunting than it is shocking as the author...
A superb third thriller from Hayder (The Treatment, 2001, etc.), who sends a troubled young Englishwoman to Tokyo in search of evidence about a half-century-old war crime.
For reasons she initially only hints at, Grey is obsessed with the 1937 Nanking massacre, a monthlong orgy of atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese army on Chinese civilians. Learning that a Chinese man who witnessed those atrocities possesses filmed footage of one particularly monstrous event, she sets out to confront Shi Chongming in Tokyo, where he is a visiting professor of sociology. The story alternates between Grey’s odyssey in Tokyo’s darker corners and Shi Chongming’s bitter diary of the ten months leading up to the Nanking massacre. Grey hooks up with Jason, a creepy American expat with a morbid sexual interest in violence, who gets her a job as a hostess at a nightclub. There, she meets Fuyuki, an elderly, ailing gangster whose terrifying “Nurse” fortifies him with a mysterious medicine. It turns out Shi Chongming desperately wants to know what this medicine is; he promises to show Grey the film if she finds out, but warns her that Fuyuki and his Nurse are exceedingly dangerous. Hayder ratchets up the tension as Grey gets closer to the gruesome secret of Fuyuki’s medicine, and as Shi Chongming’s diary chronicles his ordeal in Nanking. But this isn’t just a nail-biter; her heroine is a damaged woman whose emotional and physical scars are gradually revealed to have grim links to the ultimate atrocity Shi Chongming witnesses in Nanking. As the narrative bloodily approaches a final, horrific pair of revelations, you realize that finding out what happened doesn’t answer the real question here. What Grey and Shi Chongming, who have both ignorantly precipitated unspeakable tragedies, desperately need to know is: Is there any difference between ignorance and evil if the consequences are the same? The answer brings scant comfort to either of them.
Served up with explicit gore that is not for the faint-hearted, but even more haunting than it is shocking as the author urgently addresses basic, agonizing existential issues.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1794-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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