An effervescent ride chock-full of memorable action and characters.
A Texas sheriff tries to take down a drug lord pushing cocaine across the Mexican-U.S. border and winds up dodging bullets in Cuba and the Cayman Islands in Reneau’s (Ruby Silver, 2014, etc.) latest thriller.
When pilot and marijuana transporter Wes Stoddard tells Cameron County Sheriff Hardin Steel that he wants to go straight, the sheriff asks for a trade-off: Wes can help the DEA get his boss, Frederick Ochoa. But their plan for Wes to sell DEA-confiscated cocaine back to Ochoa backfires when Russian Alexsie Yazov, who works for Ochoa, decides to steal the coke and, for good measure, kidnap Rory Roughton, daughter of an oil tycoon and Hardin’s sometimes-girlfriend. Yazov, however, doesn’t release Rory, despite a paid ransom. So Hardin, Wes and PI Buck Bateman initiate a rescue mission in Cuba, made even more dangerous by the fact that Ochoa, still pissed about his missing cocaine, is invested in killing all of them. The novel often feels like a series of action scenes, one trailing after the other: A sting operation begets a double-cross begets retaliation and so on. Where Reneau truly excels is the action: Hardin and his pals enact blistering sequences, from a high-speed boat chase to a quick escape in a seaplane. And these scenes are rife with shocks, as one of the criminals (much worse than Wes) makes an unlikely ally for Hardin (readers should be wary of getting too attached to Hardin’s buddies). Regardless of all of the gunfire, as well as the occasional surface-to-air missile, the story generally takes on its protagonist’s easygoing nature. It’s a lighthearted affair, even considering that there are contracts out on Hardin, Wes and Buck (Hardin calls the trio “contractees”). But there’s also a visceral moment or two, because a torturer, like many of the book’s characters, will probably suffer a violent reprisal. Reneau concludes the story with a hint that something (or maybe someone) is pending and will return, welcome or not, in Book 2.
An effervescent ride chock-full of memorable action and characters.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497342477
Page Count: 354
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory,...
The creator of Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett (Breaking Point, 2013, etc.) works the area around Yellowstone National Park in this stand-alone about a long-haul trucker with sex and murder on his mind.
The Lizard King, as he calls himself, normally targets lot lizards—prostitutes who work the parking lots adjacent to the rest stops that dot interstate highways. But he’s more than happy to move up to a higher class of victim when he runs across the Sullivan sisters. Danielle, 18, and Gracie, 16, are supposed to be driving from their mother’s home in Denver to their father’s in Omaha, but Danielle has had the bright idea of heading instead to Bozeman, Mont., to visit her boyfriend, Justin Hoyt. Far from home, their whereabouts known to only a few people, the girls are the perfect victims even before they nearly collide with the Lizard King’s rig and Danielle flips him off. Hours later, very shortly after he’s caught up with them in the depths of Yellowstone and done his best to eradicate every trace of his abduction, Justin, worried that Danielle refused his last phone call, tells his father that something bad has happened. Cody Hoyt, an investigator for the Lewis and Clark County Sheriff’s Department, is already having a tough day: At the insistence of his crooked boss, Sheriff Tubman, his longtime student and new partner, Cassandra Dewell, has just caught him planting evidence in an unrelated murder, and he’s been suspended from his job. If he’s lost his badge, though, Cody’s got plenty of time on his hands to drive downstate and meet with State Trooper Rick Legerski, the ex-husband of his dispatcher’s sister, to talk about what to do next. And so the countdown begins.
Box handles this foolproof formula with complete assurance, keeping the pot at a full boil until the perfunctory, anticlimactic and unsatisfactory ending.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-58320-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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