A mass slaughter in the Capitol building sets off this third tense and twitchy installment in the adventures of investigative reporter Sully Carter.
Any Washington, D.C. resident with common sense knows that the nation’s capital is the last place you want to be at the peak of summer, with its swampy air mass and the kind of heat that’s “a hammer [hitting] you in the face.” Nevertheless, Sully is carrying out a routine newspaper assignment beneath the Capitol dome when sounds of gunfire and screaming shatter the doldrums. Sully’s war-correspondent instincts kick in as he weaves around the dead and dying toward the shooting’s source. What he eventually finds is even more horrific: the bound-and-gagged corpse of an Oklahoma congressman with ice picks protruding from both eye sockets. He also hears as the shooter calls 911 and gives his name as Terry Waters before making a clean getaway from police. Things become more bizarre between Waters’ escape and eventual arrest as he seems to adopt Sully, via phone, as his intermediary to authorities. (The gunman finds out that he and Sully have something in common: they both, at very young ages, lost their mothers to violence.) After Waters is indicted, he is committed to D.C.’s notorious St. Elizabeths mental hospital. Sully’s editors dispatch him to Oklahoma for more background on the killer, maybe even a motive. Sully finds all of that and more, far more, than he or anybody else expects, including the reader. What seems at the outset to be an exercise in formulaic “psycho killer” pyrotechnics becomes in Tucker’s hands an ingenious, expectation-trumping mystery that doesn’t scrimp on suspense or shock tactics. Those who have, after this novel’s two predecessors (Murder, D.C., 2015, etc.), become enamored with the embittered but urbane journalist may find less of his complicated personal life here. But they will find plenty more reasons to admire and even like Sully Carter.
Tucker raises the stakes and ramps up the darkness in this series and makes you wonder, and even worry a little about, what’s coming next.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42942-5
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Did you like this book?
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
47
GET IT
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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
