by Robert Martin Bishop ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2016
A high-fantasy account of reality as seen by one of Satan’s brothers, sure to appeal to lovers of both fantasy and Christian...
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Bishop’s debut novel offers the bitingly ironic confessions of a fallen angel.
This is a sprawling, alternate account of key theological points of Judeo-Christian mythology, including God’s Creation of the universe, the ordering of the heavenly host, the births of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the toiling of mankind under the whips and temptations of the forces of darkness. It’s all dictated to a hapless mortal man named Paul by a fallen angel who calls himself Jetebais, who’s the same age as other famous fallen angels, such as Lucifer, as well as the sea monster Leviathan. From him, readers learn details of different kinds of heavenly beings and of the mission that he’s set for himself in the human world: to expose the deeds and designs of Satan and thwart his manipulations of humankind. Jetebais knows Satan’s thoughts and has a carefully high estimation of his adversary’s abilities: “He is visible and invisible,” he tells Paul, “he is colossal and microscopic.” Jetebais himself is far from innocent, though; as he confesses, he’s caused great pain in the name of charity and fairness, but he’s determined to counterbalance Satan’s influence in the world. Bishop spends a good deal of time presenting seminal events from Old Testament literature from Jetebais’ new viewpoint, and he portrays Jetebais as a proud, defiant character who protests his innocence of Lucifer’s original offenses (“I did not follow Satan; I simply left at the same time!”). But as the action moves forward to the present day (including, inevitably, to papal politics), the author fills it with human characters. Readers will also find that the narrative takes on more sharply theological tones; at one point, it even provides the fallen-angel perspective on other religions throughout the world. The rest of the story, though often patchy with expository dialogue, is richly atmospheric, as when Jetebais warns humans about Satan, “Remember, you are nothing but livestock to him, to be teased and tortured for the sheer fun of it.”
A high-fantasy account of reality as seen by one of Satan’s brothers, sure to appeal to lovers of both fantasy and Christian literature.Pub Date: March 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5049-8573-4
Page Count: 302
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
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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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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