A vigorous tale in which a violent, inescapable storm terrorizes everyone, even the villains.
A forecaster at the turn of the millennium, using a nonoperational program of her own design, fears a hurricane is headed straight for an ill-prepared New York City in this thriller.
Reporter Jack Corbin’s proposed feature on National Hurricane Center forecaster Amanda Cole may be an excuse to be on-site for a storm’s landfall. He gets his wish, for better or worse, when Hurricane Gert hits right where he, Amanda, and photographer Juan Rico are waiting on Topsail Island, North Carolina. Amanda, however, is worried about an apparent last-minute glitch in the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory computer model for predicting storm movements. The program Amanda’s designed, the LORAX, or LOng RAnge eXtrapolation Hurricane Model, still in its test phase, is shut down during impending tempests to give processor power to the Geophysical lab. But a retro look reveals that the LORAX would have guessed Gert’s otherwise-unforeseen bump in strength. And now her program’s predicting forthcoming Hurricane Harvey will make landfall in New York. Jack, meanwhile, sees a potential story elsewhere: an individual made a “timely trade” on an insurance company’s stocks just before Gert hit land. This may relate to why someone’s evidently trying to prevent an evacuation in New York. But Amanda’s determined to warn everyone, not the least of whom is stubborn ex-husband Joe Springer, at a New Jersey beach with their 6-year-old daughter, Sarah. The disaster novel packs quite a bit of mystery: dubious goings-on, for example, somehow link to mole people living under the city and a Dominican drug family’s communication with the enigmatically named Octopus. But Britt (First Kill, 2016, etc.) makes it clear that Harvey’s the true antagonist, with colossal waves flooding the streets and heavy winds tearing roofs from buildings. Jack and Amanda, reunited after sparks during Hurricane Andrew in 1992, share a somewhat hastily re-energized romance on Topsail. This does, nonetheless, add Jack to Amanda’s growing list of anxieties while the storm rages on, along with her dad, Ed, at a Coney Island nursing home, and Sarah. Perspectives from multiple characters are a worthy setup for an exhilarating final act, with a relentless hurricane and a frighteningly high body count.
A vigorous tale in which a violent, inescapable storm terrorizes everyone, even the villains.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Ink Spot Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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
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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