Too much and too little.
Army investigators track a deserter into the Venezuelan jungle.
DeMille's last thriller (The Cuban Affair, 2017) successfully incorporated Cuba's precarious internal politics into the plot, and this one—the first he's written with his son Alex—attempts to do the same with Venezuela's faltering existence. Kyle Mercer, a high-value Delta Force soldier, deserted his unit in Afghanistan, was captured by the Taliban, and then escaped his captors. He has been spotted in Venezuela, and Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, investigators for the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, are dispatched to bring him back to stand trial. This seems straightforward, but there are questions: Why did Mercer desert? Is the U.S. government wholly determined to have him brought back alive? And more immediately and practically, how can the CID team function in the failed state of Venezuela? The situation in Venezuela is painstakingly delineated, but it remains an element of the setting, never rising to the level of a plot device as Cuban political tensions did in the earlier novel; the result is a dreary repetition of the facts of life in Caracas: bribery and violence, violence and bribery. Brodie and Taylor are fortunate to secure the services of Luis, a Venezuelan driver who is a likable but somewhat predictable character, and with his help they are able to discover that Mercer has left Caracas and is now in the jungle in the south. The doughty investigators track him there, learn the ugly truth about his defection and about the real nature of Brendan Worley, the purported attaché in Caracas. There is much to like about this story: Brodie's and Taylor's attempts to avoid a growing attraction; a useful discussion of the legal definition of "desertion"; some of the descriptions of the geography of southern Venezuela; and the reminder of what those in power will do to avoid embarrassment. But the story is too long and lacks dramatic variety, asking over and over the same questions: Where is Mercer? Why did he do it? Who wants him dead rather than alive?
Too much and too little.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0175-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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