A sensational protagonist pitted against hazards in the swamp and dangerous men.
The Drug Enforcement Administration sends a resourceful graduate student to locate a meth and Ecstasy factory hidden in the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana in Gallant’s debut thriller, the first in a series.
When a game warden and undercover agent turn up dead, the DEA enlists Travis Weld’s help in tracking down a south Louisiana drug distributor. Weld’s choice for a recruit is graduate student Chesney Barrett, who already has a grant to conduct environmental studies in the Atchafalaya Basin, where authorities found both bodies. Chesney’s not an agent, but Weld believes the grant provides her with a credible cover story. Likewise, as a former Olympic swimmer, Chesney shares similarities to the athletic dead wife of wealthy plantation owner Jacques Dupree. And the DEA suspects Tate Melancon, who runs Dupree’s plantation, is the head of the drug operation. Weld gives Chesney a crash course in fighting and spinning a cover story, but she’ll have to rely on her wits if she hopes to stay alive. The novel showcases an able protagonist with an incentive to face the daunting assignment: an absconding drug dealer caused the accident that killed her mother. The ever distrustful baddies, including Melancon’s henchman Gator Guidry, relentlessly question Chesney, who excels under pressure. She’s also adept in physical confrontations and gunplay. Most of the male characters are villains, so it’s unsurprising that leering men surround Chesney. But unfortunately, Weld is only a modest improvement. His gruff training entails tossing Chesney around, ripping off her shirt, and threatening to rape her. He’s not much of a lawman either, opting to kill bad guys even when they’re surrendering. But Weld takes a back seat to the proficient graduate student, who braves more than just men, from the bayou’s alligators to hanging water moccasins who have a tendency to fall into boats. Gallant bolsters his tale with a possible DEA mole and Chesney’s wavering doubts about other characters. Befriending the seemingly kindhearted Lionel Fremin, she is smart enough to be cautious around him. Meanwhile, she might be developing genuine feelings for the dubious Dupree. Gallant’s prose focuses on the environment, aptly detailing the Atchafalaya Basin’s marshy lands.
A sensational protagonist pitted against hazards in the swamp and dangerous men.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40467-4
Page Count: 210
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
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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