A globe-hopping thriller that engages and entertains, misleading title be damned.
A topical, fast-paced thriller that—despite its awkward title—explores the fictional ramifications of the Lockerbie bombing.
Federal judge Randolph Elliott is hoping to reconcile with his daughter, Diana, when she returns to New York after a trip to London. Though the two aren’t close, Diana is coming home for Christmas, and even the judge’s alcoholic wife manages to wake from her stupor to get excited. But the date is December 21, 1988, and Diana boards Pan Am Flight 103. Along with 258 other passengers on the plane, Diana perishes; shortly thereafter, Elliott’s wife kills herself. After he mourns, the judge gets angry. But Elliott knows better than most that there’s little point in suing Pan Am due to an international treaty that bars punitive damages in air-accident lawsuits. The inability to find justice through the courts is particularly galling since, two years before the bombing, Pan Am’s (fictional) former CEO, a Texas-born millionaire named Teddy Bakker, “issued a confidential directive that security be kept to a minimum.” While the judge and other victims’ relatives seethe, the Lockerbie incident prompts action at the highest levels of government through the creation of Olympiad—a fictional “international team, operating alone and covertly, with a mandate outside of the justice system” to target terrorists through their arms-supply pipelines. Will Judge Elliott get his vengeance? Will Olympiad be able to stop the Provisional IRA and Colombian crooks from shipping explosives while simultaneously getting to the bottom of the Lockerbie bombing? The premise is compelling and the locations are vivid, whether the characters are drinking beer at a Florida baseball stadium, gazing at the night sky from an oceanfront home in Libya or fighting traffic in Venezuela. From New York cop Jimmy Kenneally to Sal Luongo (the hot dog vendor mentioned in the title) and the doomed Diana Elliott, who had a bright future as a policy wonk despite her inherited love of the bottle, Brooks’ characters are lifelike and nuanced. However, Brooks spends too much time developing characters that appear only briefly in the novel. When an Olympiad agent encounters an ex-boyfriend from Oxford University—who’s around for only one chapter—readers not only see them flirt, banter and reminisce, but they also learn all about the ex-boyfriend’s studies in anthropology, a recent field trip to New Mexico and an undergrad visit to Papua New Guinea. Lengthy digressions into the family histories and educational backgrounds of minor characters appear frequently, slowing down the otherwise brisk pace of this well-plotted novel.
A globe-hopping thriller that engages and entertains, misleading title be damned.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 371
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2013
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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