A man working for the American Embassy in Lebanon employs whatever means necessary to expose the organization behind a series of car bombings.
Conrad Prosser, immersed in the civil disorder of early-’80s Beirut, excels at gathering intelligence but is overlooked for a promotion as he is unable to proficiently handle the “essential task” of recruiting agents. Car bombings are escalating while Prosser begins courting Rima, sister to a prospective recruit. Prosser’s information traces some of the city’s unrest to the precarious Col. Hisham, but while he learns that a foreign (American) spy has been targeted for assassination, he doesn’t seem to realize that someone is following him. Author Fleming’s (Star Chamber Brotherhood, 2010, etc.) novel adequately details the lives of people accustomed to a land besieged by violence. Prosser passes by armed militiamen during a morning jog; a baseball game is interrupted by exploding artillery shells, and then quickly recommences to preclude a forfeit; sentries at a checkpoint wave drivers through, despite the obvious presence of a sniper just ahead. Survival seems predicated on caution and paranoia, as Prosser is particularly careful when meeting with agents, even going so far as to travel an alternate route to elude potential surveillance. Prosser is multifaceted, fully capable and perceptive, but steadfast in his distrust. As such, those who know him are kept at a distance, like the spy using an alias for each of his sources of intel (a different name for each man) and his girlfriend little more than a way to advance his career. The possibility of bloodshed at any moment makes simply driving in congested traffic a white-knuckle affair and keeps the story at a constantly elevated level of suspense. The strongest point of Fleming’s novel is its ambiance, as the characters are surrounded by the sounds of warfare. There are ample action sequences, but with Prosser hearing guns constantly fired, even the more languid moments move with a searing undertone. A persistent reminder of Beirut’s hostilities seems to justify Prosser’s lingering doubt of others, adding an edge to any interaction he has. Uncertainty among the characters coupled with relentless gunfire and explosions make for an extraordinary novel, each page just as eruptive as the city which provides the setting.
Pub Date: July 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0982959435
Page Count: -
Publisher: PF Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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