This insufficiently edited but smart, current, and intricate tale of espionage will appeal to fans of John le Carré, John...
A plot hatched by Iranian Intelligence to destroy U.S. oil reserves, assassinate key Saudis, and overthrow the Saudi King takes on a life of its own in this multifaceted spy thriller.
There are no good guys in the spy game. Certainly not in Knowles’ debut novel where no one can be trusted. Whatever side, whether agent, terrorist, soldier, or politician—all are in it solely for money, personal gain, or revenge. It starts when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadi agrees to an idea, seeing it as a possible way to rid himself of the plan’s proponent, General Hashemi, head of Iranian Intelligence Service—a man hated seemingly by everyone in Iran. For the plot to work, the assassination must be pinned on the CIA. Enter Gordon Draper, a disgruntled CIA employee who agrees to assemble the hit team from mercenaries previously employed by the agency. The hope is blame will fall on the boss who demoted him. In due course, jihadists succeed in blowing up and contaminating oil pumping stations in Texas and Louisiana; various people are used, double-crossed, or disposed of; CIA operative Bill Barone and Mossad’s Washington Chief of Station Ben Zev are deployed to investigate the unauthorized hit squad; and a plethora of screw-ups, betrayals, and payoffs somehow continue to breathe life into the scheme long after it should have expired. Knowles’ serpentine plotline makes for solid spy suspense laced with dark humor and cynicism. The book is a page-turner despite containing nearly as many typos and grammatical snafus as plot twists, some as obvious as shifting from third person to first person in the course of a single paragraph: “Bill Barone had been married to a girl named Margo. While we were dating, everything was better than perfect.” In the end, however, the sheer power of Knowles’ intricate narrative, faultless characterizations, and snide wit carry the day.
This insufficiently edited but smart, current, and intricate tale of espionage will appeal to fans of John le Carré, John Altman, and Phillip Kerr.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2018
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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