Occasionally engaging, but very standard stuff—and, ultimately, implausible.
Debut thriller about Vietnam POWs loses its way in a labyrinth of checkmates, traitors, and doubles.
Wetterhahn, a retired Air Force pilot and author of a nonfiction work about Vietnam POWs and MIAs (The Last Battle: The Mayaguez Incident and the End of the Vietnam War, 2001), here presents a fictional treatment that suggests what could have happened to some of the POWs. He begins simply enough with fighter pilot Will Cadence, whose father Jack went down with a plane in ’Nam. According to the US government, Jack later died in a North Vietnam POW camp. Visiting his father’s gravesite, Will is approached by Pam Robbins, who insists that Cadence Sr. is alive. She shows Will a photo of his father that impels him to take action. He turns to third-party presidential candidate Hank Dalton, who flew the mission that led to Jack’s fate. Will asks Dalton to assign him to the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he hopes to find telling clues of his father’s existence. At agency headquarters, in Honolulu, Will meets forensic anthropologist Dr. Gabrielle DeJean. Despite her initial resistance (which will fool no one), he soon draws “Gabbie” into the case—and into his arms. The couple’s investigation is scarcely underway when someone sabotages Will’s car in what looks like an attempt to get him off the scent. Then Pam Robbins turns up dead under mysterious circumstances. Will and Gabbie embark on a junket that takes them to Laos, Bangkok, Moscow, and Ukraine, culminating in a midair transfer from one plane to another as they escape Russia. The plot they uncover is far more fantastical than the one Richard Condon spun in The Manchurian Candidate—and far less convincing. Wetterhahn’s straightforward prose never evokes the paranoia capable of suggesting that all here could be so.
Occasionally engaging, but very standard stuff—and, ultimately, implausible.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1080-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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