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BEYOND TOP SECRET

Smart and sleek as the secrets slowly spill out.

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In Lubitz’s (Breaking Free, 2011) thriller, a woman’s trial for murder puts numerous people in danger when it threatens to expose a covert government assassination.

Wilhelm Kronig, the former CIA deputy director, is determined to keep quiet about a buried 1969 experiment for a potent hypnotic drug. But 9/11 changes his mind. He tells the agency how to recover the supposedly destroyed formula and suggests using it for a black op to assassinate Osama bin Laden. Recently, however, participants from said experiment have killed their families and themselves on the day of their 60th birthdays. This doesn’t bode well for Alana Shannon, who shot hubby Steve in self-defense but can’t explain why he went gunning for her. She and an old flame, Environmental Protection Agency attorney Ryan Butler, know a little about the drug due to their involvement in a 1986 incident, which the CIA covered up. But building a legal defense based on that classified information is something the CIA won’t allow—even if it means making sure the witnesses don’t make it to trial. As the story progresses, Lubitz’s rapid-paced novel maintains suspense by sprinkling information like colors dabbled on the canvas of a slowly forming portrait. Much of the info is imparted by characters who, like Ryan, are reluctant or afraid to reveal everything at one time, so scenes are comprised largely of mere dialogue exchanges rather than action. Yet this doesn’t hold up the novel in the least, thanks to Lubitz’s intelligent writing and the story’s fresh, contemporary villains. Physical assaults or threats, for example, simply aren’t necessary when a well-spoken CIA agent can tell Ryan how easily the agency could frame him for treason. There’s likewise an ever present but veiled threat: computers or evidence go missing, while those people relevant to the trial either disappear or meet unfortunate accidents. This is the second book to feature Ryan and Alana, and Lubitz drops enough hints surrounding the 1986 event—in which Ryan killed a man to save Alana—to pique interest for his prior novel without spoiling or regurgitating the story. The coda goes on for a bit too long, but there’s an exhaustive wrap-up that includes elaborating on the birthday homicides and the ongoing bin Laden operation.

Smart and sleek as the secrets slowly spill out.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-1491757734

Page Count: 328

Publisher: iUniverse

Review Posted Online: April 6, 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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