A well-executed mix of Indiana Jones–style adventure and political thriller.
A search for an ancient set of magical beads leads to a violent chase across London in this suspenseful thriller.
The second installment in Parsons’ (Baden-Powell’s Beads, 2012) adventure series continues his saga centered around a set of ancient beads imbued with mysterious powers. Dr. David Freeman owns one of these beads—a present from a dying patient—but the tiny artifact seems to be more of a curse than a gift. Cheri Hassan, a steely, sexy assassin, tracks Freeman to Memphis, intent on getting her hands on the bead. Freeman and his girlfriend, Pam Blanchard, flee to London with U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents Patrick Dartson and Adnan Fazeph, where they hope an elderly war hero can shed light on the beads’ history. It turns out that many people are willing to kill for these strange items, which have a back story that goes back to the dawn of Christianity. Hassan in hot pursuit, and the foursome must also contend with a corrupt Scotland Yard official, Raoul Livingston, and a gang of violent Rastafarians. This high-stakes thriller is a true page-turner, although readers who haven’t read the series’ first installment may have some trouble getting up to speed. That said, the author’s lively prose and edge-of-your-seat action sequences will draw readers in and keep them engaged; the beads’ history is particularly compelling, if somewhat convoluted. A dramatic final showdown in an old English manor house ties up many loose ends but leaves enough details unresolved to allow a sequel. The novel does make a few missteps, however; for example, the author gives Livingston and Fazeph a score to settle, unrelated to the beads, that seems to be an awkward attempt to breathe life into the latter character. Readers may also find the idea of Rastafarian terrorists committed to “total destruction of the infidels” hard to swallow. Nonetheless, many will eagerly await the series’ next volume, which promises to reveal even more about the beads’ history and their power.
A well-executed mix of Indiana Jones–style adventure and political thriller.Pub Date: April 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482546941
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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