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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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