A deep, satirically streaked dive into the violent culture of Guatemala.
Corruption—personal, political, institutional—is at the core of acclaimed Guatemalan novelist Rey Rosa's tale of a half-baked plot to kill a leading human rights activist.
The young would-be hit man, Rafael, known as the Cobra, is the illegitimate son of an investigating judge in the El Salvador city of Sonsonate, where the boy grew up on the street and collected debts for a local gang. To get him out of sight, his image-conscious father gets him a job in Guatemala as bodyguard and driver for wealthy fixer Don Emilio Carrión, who facilitates illicit deals between the government and multinational companies. Polo Yrrarraga, the bellicose human rights activist, has been causing trouble with his verbal attacks on predatory miners in Toó, an unprotected communal center of Mayan culture in the lush western highlands. With his vague sense of morality, the Cobra has no problem with silencing him—until he starts listening to what Polo says and, of all things, becomes friends with him. Though set against a backdrop of political assassinations—of schoolteachers and students as well as politicians—the novel finds uplift in the efforts of people to live their lives in spite of the chronic violence. The landscape of mountains and ravines, “as though painted in watercolour,” plays a huge role in their collective sense of identity, which makes its destruction all the more painful. Though the book sometimes stalls with its elliptical approach and slippery sense of focus, its sly humor helps make up for that. Among the secondary characters are the Bore (a Borges aficionado and “anarchist blogger”) and Spam (a former publicist).
A deep, satirically streaked dive into the violent culture of Guatemala.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781771965149
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
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
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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