An action-packed ride that is sometimes slowed by tedious dialogue.
A private investigator, tasked with protecting a drug cartel snitch, discovers a complex criminal operation in this sixth installment of a series.
Jake Travis is hired to babysit Alejandro Vizcarro, a bookkeeper for Sergio Flores, the head of a Mexican drug cartel. The plan is to smuggle Vizcarro—who is prepared to exchange incriminating information for safe passage and protection for himself and his wife, Martina—into the United States. But when the detective collects Vizcarro, he realizes he’s also bringing the bookkeeper’s two daughters and Joe, his 3-year-old nephew. Joe is now Vizcarro’s ward after Flores had his brother killed along with his wife and three other children. Soon, Vizcarro and Martina are murdered, and the children mysteriously disappear—Jake feels compelled to dig deeper and see if he can uncover any information that leads to their discovery. While canvassing the neighborhood, he meets Stephen Cole, a former attorney—he once represented Sean Wright, a dirty cop who he believes was killed by drug cartel assassins. But the further Jake investigates Vizcarro’s murder, the less it makes sense—Cole believes the victim was an unlikely candidate for a cartel bookkeeper and suspects that Martina wasn’t really his wife. Not only is it possible that the deaths of Wright and Vizcarro are connected, but also that the latter’s murder isn’t even the end game for Flores. Jake is confronted by the morbid possibility that the vanished children, or at least one of them, are the real prize. Lane (Naked We Came, 2017, etc.) once again showcases Jake, a protagonist perfectly suited (if somewhat formulaically) to the genre. Hardened by grim experience, he is also capable of both moral principle and emotional vulnerability. The plot is exceeding complex—one could quibble it demands a lot from readers in search of pulp detective fiction—but it never devolves into convolution. Unfortunately, the dialogue’s staccato banter quickly becomes more exhausting than clever: “ ‘What did you do?’ ‘Robbed a bank.’ ‘You did not,’ she said. ‘Stole the sheriff’s horse.’ ‘Seriously.’ ‘Shot a wabbit?’ ”
An action-packed ride that is sometimes slowed by tedious dialogue.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Mason Alley Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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