A dark redemption tale, but not one for the faint of heart.
As his long-dormant conscience slowly revives, a Black Ops assassin wrestles with his role as a pawn in the Vietnam War in Lealos’ (Pashtun, 2014, etc.) powerful novel.
In 1969, Frank Morgan is an American assassin in Vietnam known as “the Night Snake.” He receives his orders from an agency, Phoenix, that doesn’t officially exist, is answerable to no one, and funds itself in part with money from drugs, prostitution and the sale of orphans. Morgan fits right into this world, however, as he was brought up by a father he calls “the Colonel,” a militaristic lunatic who always raised him to be a soldier. At first, Morgan has little problem with taking part in dubious operations for the greater glory of the United States, although he does have nightmares that he beats back with drugs and drink. But when he kills Liem Tran, a Sorbonne-educated woman with striking green eyes, it particularly affects him, even though Phoenix says that she’s a top Viet Cong cadre chief. When he learns that the mission was actually revenge for Tran’s refusal to sleep with a South Vietnamese official—and that most of his other assignments may be equally bogus—Morgan goes rogue, killing people he’s not assigned to terminate while letting other targets go free. Lealos presents Vietnam as a Dantean landscape from which no one ever really returns, not even the survivors. He underscores its futility through Morgan’s cynical, first-person Mickey Spillane–speak, which draws every comparison by using words of war (“The only noise the M79 thumper in my chest”; “The sound was like snapping my M16 to full auto”; “The kiss lasted longer than it took between hearing the hushed thud of a mortar tube and the impact”). Overall, it’s a gut-wrenchingly realistic portrayal of how violence, politics and corruption combine to destroy the souls of people and countries.
A dark redemption tale, but not one for the faint of heart.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-1629145723
Page Count: 324
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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