Hill, author of superior mysteries (A Pinch of Snuff) and so-so espionage (The Spy's Wife), now branches out into international conspiracy-suspense-with a crisp, agreeably peopled reworking of the sort of plot that was already old hat when Agatha Christie tried it on in the Twenties. (Not to mention Robert Ludlum in the Seventies.) A human tongue is found on an English beach; an investigative journalist is burned to death. Could these two events be connected? And what might they have to do with Prince Arthur, a handsome young royal who's about to visit Canada? Well, as is soon made dear, some British species of super-Mafioso secret society—using Freemasonry as a cover—is behind the mayhem. And they're also behind a sex/blackmail scheme to control the US political career of rich young Conal Connolly . . . whose sister Deirdre just happens to be the secret lover of Prince Arthur (to the fury of her Irish-American grandfather). So, as Arthur heads for Canada—where he'll rendezvous with Deirdre—the secret assassins are planning all kinds of evil. But someone is catching on to them: cop Doug McHarg, a glum, sardonic widower who used to be the security man for Prince Arthur. Surviving a series of Masonic death-attacks, McHarg investigates the secret society, exposes the society's chief hit-man (who is accidentally killed by McHarg's tart-tongued new love, wheelchair-bound Betty), and then heads for America—to figure out what the society is up to over there . . . and to visit his estranged daughter Flora. (In the novel's most flagrant spot of coincidence, Flora just happens to be the mistress of the third Connolly sibling, a Boston professor.) And so it goes—right up to the predictable shootout/showdown and the unmasking of the society's hitherto-faceless leader. Still, if Hill's plotting is farfetched, contrived, and derivative, his characters are a treat—smart/funny women, endearing bit players, a tough/tender hero—and his scene-by-scene storytelling is sparely effective, with understated jolts of violence. A half-appealing hybrid, then: a corny conspiracy yarn delivered with charm, irony, and laid-back savvy—more akin to Christie and Buchan than Ludlum & Co.
Pub Date: June 14, 1982
ISBN: 1933397020
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982
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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