Hill, author of the fine Dalziel/Pascoe mysteries, is less sure-footed when it comes to espionage thrillers—this is his weakest effort in that genre: a hectic yet talky spy/revenge/chase tale that begins with a certain far-fetched vigor, then becomes gnarled in increasingly tiresome convolutions. The sardonic, near-obnoxious narrator is aristocrat Lem Swift, 40, "the well-known charity embezzler, illegal arms dealer and fugitive from justice," who's enjoying the expatriate life in Venezuela. . .until he's informed that he has terminal stomach cancer. So, determined to see his estranged daughter Angle before dying, Swift sneaks back home to England—only to be grabbed immediately by British intelligence. Why so? Because they want Swift to go to Italy to kill his famous father-scientist Billy, who defected to Moscow 20 years ago after allegedly killing Swift's mother. Now, it seems, Billy intends to re-defect, stand trial, and Tell All—which would include some secrets sure to embarrass the British establishment (and the USSR). Swift, under ruthless pressure and full of hate for his father, grudgingly agrees, arrives in Rome, seeks out his half-sister Teresa (a likely contact for fugitive Billy), and is soon deep in mayhem. His ex-wife turns up dead; Teresa is tortured; KGB agents are everywhere. Eventually there's a family reunion within a KGB stronghold—followed by a father/son escape by boat, with fatal results for Billy (semi-reconciled with Swift at last). And now Swift, who isn't really dying of cancer (it's all been an elaborate hoax, of course), sets out to take revenge—and to learn the whole, murky truth about his parents' assorted espionage/sex affiliations. Swift's acerbic delivery provides some initial zest, with crisply nasty dialogue galore. This tone soon palls, however—especially in the jokey sex-and-violence relationship between Swift and a tough female British agent. More crucially, the plot—despite knots of visceral action—slides into long-winded explanations and over-familiar twists. . .while plausibility (marginal to begin with) fades progressively. Unsympathetic hero, frenetic doings: disappointing suspense—even if stylish reminders of Hill's considerable talent abound.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1986
ISBN: 1934609188
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Countryman
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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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