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The Wicked Game

Fast, incisive, and audaciously entertaining. Readers may have seen it before, but they’ll likely enjoy it this time around.

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In Smith’s (Alive! Not Dead, 2014) thriller, a man is caught in an adult version of hide-and-seek, complete with rifle-toting players who’ll kill to stay alive.

Brad Jeffries signed up for Game Corp’s infamous competition to win the $10,000 prize. Though the game’s Head Leader has become a celebrity with frequent interviews and best-selling self-help books, no one’s ever seen actual game footage. Nevertheless, a bus transports Brad and 19 other players to an undisclosed neighborhood in Atlanta, where they learn the rules: each round has one seeker, who can take out hiders by shooting them dead with a rifle. Leaders are likewise available to remove players from the game—i.e., by killing them or having them killed—for violating rules, like trying to leave before the game is finished. Brad wants to expose the mysterious game, but now with a promise of a billion dollars for the winner, he may have to spill blood just to avoid losing. Stories such as this have developed their own subgenre, but Smith is fortunately aware of the plot’s familiarity. He wastes no time and dives into the short novel with gusto, opening immediately with Game Corp transporting players. Danger is quickly evident: leaders provide an apt display of how players are “taken from the game” (the game starts with fewer than the initial 20 contestants). Brad’s internal debates consist of questions readers will be asking themselves: the validity of the billion-dollar award, or the possibility of one or more of the players being Game Corp plants. Players are designated by numbers, so most don’t have genuine names, but that doesn’t diminish their impact. For example, Brad never learns the real name of his most formidable (and terrifying) opponent. Never-ending game play also helps maintain a speedy tempo; even brief moments of downtime are intense, because the Head Leader adds new rules whenever he sees fit. Brad’s natural progression into a bloodthirsty competitor, however, is perhaps the story’s most disconcerting aspect. Smith falters only with the ending, which feels rushed. But there’s definite resolution because—for better or worse—the game’s over.

Fast, incisive, and audaciously entertaining. Readers may have seen it before, but they’ll likely enjoy it this time around.

Pub Date: July 15, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4961-3980-1

Page Count: 200

Publisher: create space

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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