A first-rate finale to a gloomy but frequently engrossing seafaring series.
In this conclusion to Lambert’s (Bite of the Jackal, 2016, etc.) adventure trilogy, a ship captain’s lost love returns as a deadly spirit seeking revenge against the pirate who tore the couple apart.
Seventeenth-century Capt. Silas Pike, blaming pirate Jackal for the death of his fiancee, Francine Adams, has already destroyed ships aligned with the buccaneer. Seeing holy man Kum beckoning him in dreams, Pike and his crew sail to West Africa, where Kum performs a ritual to aid the captain on his path to vengeance. Francine’s spirit is cast into a wooden figurehead, carved in her likeness and intended to adorn the front of the ship. Bound to Francine are spirit sisters, including a wrathful dark one, while another angry spirit curses Pike. After Francine has helped find Jackal, Pike will be a target. Jackal, meanwhile, fearing Pike’s recent attacks have revealed the location of his treasure, hurries to transport his gold to another hiding spot, keeping an eye out for the captain’s ship, the Avenger. Centuries later, in 2015, Francine’s figurehead, recovered from a Virginia beach, has summoned her love to return to her. But Pike’s spirit is malevolent, putting all mortals aboard the reconstructed Avenger—Evan Taylor and his family—in danger. Though Lambert’s series exhibits an unhurried pace, the action-laden final tale features clanging swords and a startling amount of deaths. It’s also the most somber; there’s a sense of impending doom for many characters, from Pike and Jackal to the people in 2015. Lucid descriptions often reflect this bleakness, like a thick fog arriving shortly before a ship’s crew spots the Avenger: “As if a cloud had dropped all the way down and rested on the water, and they were in the middle of it.” The books truly tell an epic story in three parts. New readers won’t be confused, but the trilogy is best explored in its entirety, particularly the reveal of one character’s identity—shocking only to those familiar with the earlier novels.
A first-rate finale to a gloomy but frequently engrossing seafaring series.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2017
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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