An unusual, if initially slow-going, story that offers a pairing that’s as creative as it is unexpected.
MacAvoy (Tea with the Black Dragon, 2014, etc.) and debut author Palmer offer a novel about a fugitive physicist and a renegade investigator who helps him.
As the story opens, Dr. Rob MacAulay is about to begin a job as a gardener at the Royal Dornoch Links golf course in Scotland. What is a man with doctorates in mathematics and quantum field physics doing in such a position? It turns out that he’s wanted by the “National Crime Agency: Anti-Terrorism Division,” but he’s an unlikely fugitive. The novel doesn’t present the circumstances of his alleged crime outright, but readers will guess from his gentle demeanor that he could hardly be guilty. Meanwhile, an American, Thomas Heddiman, provides special investigative assistance to the police in Edinburgh. He’s estranged from his famous, wealthy family, and although his last name causes his co-workers to whisper, his great work speaks for itself: he’s “broken three wide-spread financial hackings and one cyber bank job,” and is, without a doubt, an investigational and technological wizard. After a stranger tries to shoot him, though, he wonders why someone wants him dead. And after a bombing in London’s Piccadilly Circus, not even a man as shrewd as Thomas can say what the future holds. The authors then lead readers on a journey that becomes bizarre, to say the least. As Rob’s and Thomas’ paths cross, their destinies inevitably linked, the narrative shifts from being an ordinary man-on-the-run escapade to one that’s fantastical, spooky, and ultimately romantic. However, the story is slowed at first by a plethora of overexplanation; for example, does the reader really need to know the subtleties of Rob’s work at Royal Dornoch? Still, those who sympathize with the birdlike Rob will likely find themselves committed to seeing where his twisty adventure takes him. Even readers as intelligent as the story’s leads may not be prepared for its conclusion.
An unusual, if initially slow-going, story that offers a pairing that’s as creative as it is unexpected.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Shanachie Press
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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