Dead-on Cold War fiction. Noir to the bone.
A moody debut spy novel inspired by real events.
In 1953, the world is filled with angst. Stalin is dead, and the USSR is in turmoil. A Soviet mole has penetrated the CIA, causing missions to fail and agents to die. The CIA has code-named him Protocol, and in Washington, D.C., agent George Mueller must uncover him. Mueller wants to get out of his double life because “Washington was a terrible place for honorable men to work,” and he hates “the red-baiting spectacle in Congress.” He has no friends, because “friendship is a dangerous luxury.” Indeed, there’s little that he seems to like. “My indifference is a life preserver against a tide of joyless disappointments,” he says. When he chats with Yuri Vasilenko, head of the Soviet trade mission and a likely agent of the secret police, Vasilenko tells him, “Our countries share one thing. Corruption.…Our jobs require that we lie to each other.” One afternoon, Mueller rides home on a bicycle and is run off the road and injured. He finds himself at the home of Beth Altman, who gets him medical care and invites him to stay for dinner. Beth’s brother, Roger, works for the State Department. He’s homosexual, a secret that if made public would lump him with communists in the eyes of Congress. So he’s vulnerable to blackmail, but Mueller knows about Roger’s sexual orientation and fully trusts him. Vasilenko tries to recruit Mueller as a double agent. Mueller’s missteps get him in trouble; for example, he has an “unauthorized meeting with the other side” and fails a polygraph test. Washington is a dour setting, as hammered home by excessive weather reports such as the “low ceiling of angry clouds,” and Mueller’s attitude fits right in.
Dead-on Cold War fiction. Noir to the bone.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1038-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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