The desperate and complicated political undercurrents of the late Cold War generate plenty of action; Faith is likely to be...
A steadily suspenseful, if sometimes sappy, Cold War thriller.
First-timer Hillhouse sets up an intriguing scenario—East Germany’s leader Erich Honecker and his Stasi allies want to assassinate Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev before his reforms unite the two Germanys and the Berlin wall comes down—and plays it out admirably. Faith Whitney, whose mother smuggled Bibles into the Soviet Union, is a freelance smuggler herself, picking up tchotchkes like china teacups with hammer-and-sickled–shaped handles in East Berlin to sell in the West. In April 1989, she’s blackmailed by the Stasi into helping them with a plot to assassinate Gorbachev. (Honecker speculates that he would not survive the 40 years of “repressed wrath” of the East German citizens, nor the revenge of the former Nazis still in the West German judicial system.) Zara Bogdanov, a lesbian KGB agent, kidnaps Faith and tries to turn her into a double agent, using the extra bait that she can find out about Faith’s father, who her mother has kept a mystery. Suddenly Faith is caught in the “rift zone” between two factions of communists. She’s tortured by both the Stasi and the KGB, and limps through much of the book with broken ribs. Unknown to her, she’s being set up to look like a CIA agent who assassinates Gorbachev, letting the Stasi and KGB hardliners off the hook. Faith squeezes out of various tight spots with lots of help, thanks to Hakan, a Turkish operative who’s a master at forgery; Max Summers, an Ozarks ex-boyfriend who is an explosive disposal expert, even her estranged mother, who is operating an orphanage in Moscow and is smuggling explosives to the besieged Armenian Christians in Azerbaijan. The dialogue is lousy, and Faith, who tends to tremble, seems at times as if she belongs in a romance novel (the ending is shamelessly rosy). At her best, Faith is ingenious and plucky; she knows her Semtex from her C-4, her East/West Berlin and Moscow locations, and how to maneuver without a passport. Ultimately, she outsmarts the intelligence hierarchy of three regimes.
The desperate and complicated political undercurrents of the late Cold War generate plenty of action; Faith is likely to be back.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-31013-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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