A sprawling, cinematic spy thriller where family loyalty and global politics collide in explosive fashion.
A Sydney restaurant murder, a submarine battle in the South China Sea, and an assassination attempt on a U.S. vice president set the international stage for the third book in Jacuzzi’s thriller series.
When Lachlan Doyle, a restaurant owner in Sydney, is gunned down after hours (“The back of his head shattered in a fog of blood, and Doyle’s body collapsed, overturning a table and smashing dishes”), the crime at first seems a local concern. But the killers’ true targets—two mysterious sealed boxes—link the scene to a sprawling international conspiracy. Soon, the action pivots from Australia to San Francisco, where Canadian intelligence operative Dalton Drake, a former CSIS agent turned private contractor, is pulled into a covert dinner meeting with U.S. Vice President Sally Garrison. She reveals a chilling pattern of coordinated strikes on Western military assets: “The only dots we’ve connected between these incidents is that the intel would have been only shared through Five Eyes...That’s a leak in a very big bucket.” From there, the story moves at a breakneck pace. In one standout sequence, an Australian nuclear submarine faces down a Chinese destroyer: “Conn, sonar. Torpedo in the water! Closing at thirty knots. Impact at…two minutes, fifteen seconds.” The prose’s sense of immediacy and technical precision recalls the work of Tom Clancy, while quieter moments—such as Drake’s easy banter with his wife, Abby—lend a touch of warmth (“Sally never makes social calls just to say hi,” Abby observes. “It sounds like something’s up, and she needs help”). Though character depth sometimes takes a back seat to exposition, the book thrives on its global sweep, convincing military detail, and nonstop momentum. Drake, aided by his battle-tested wife and determined son, proves to be a sturdy anchor in a world where information is the deadliest weapon.
A sprawling, cinematic spy thriller where family loyalty and global politics collide in explosive fashion.Pub Date: July 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781038341969
Page Count: 348
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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