Tanenbaum writes such a mean page that the faithful will keep turning them anyway. The epilogue is guaranteed to keep fans...
Butch Karp’s 17th slate of cases runs the gamut from greedy criminals trying to railroad innocent citizens of the City of New York to terrorists plotting to blow the whole shooting match sky-high.
Twelve years after a gang of five Coney Island kids raped new mother Liz Tyler and left her for dead, a sixth man, a lifer at Rikers, has confessed to the crime and claimed he was her only assailant. Egged on by politically ambitious attorney Hugh Louis, who demands their immediate release from prison, Jayshon Sykes and his posse promptly sue the city for $250 million. Since pusillanimous Kings County District Attorney Kristine Breman has already caved, the mayor-elect leans on Butch, now New York’s Acting District Attorney, to defend the city. Meanwhile, Marlene Ciampi, Butch’s wife, has gotten involved in another rape case, taking up the cudgels for Alexis Michalik, a visiting Russian professor accused by NYU graduate student Sarah Ryder of drugging and assaulting her. Both cases seem explosive, but they may not amount to a hill of beans compared to (1) the hints that David Grale, the murderous vigilante social worker who’s returned from death to stalk the dreams of Butch’s daughter Lucy, may be literally alive, and (2) a plot by Muslim terrorists to blow up Times Square at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Veterans of the long-running series (Hoax, 2004, etc.) will know, however, that Tanenbaum is a lot more compelling when he concentrates on the political dimensions of ordinary felonies than when he kicks it up a notch by dragging in international terrorists and millennialist messiahs. Most of the characters in this installment are so broadly drawn and their allegiances so black and white that it’s pretty obvious how things will end up.
Tanenbaum writes such a mean page that the faithful will keep turning them anyway. The epilogue is guaranteed to keep fans hanging from a cliff till next year.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-5290-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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