by Ronan Bennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2007
A hugely enjoyable, brilliant high-wire act.
Why would a reclusive chess master be at the heart of a plot to kill the Tsar? That’s just one of the puzzles in this taut, intricate thriller set in pre-revolutionary Russia, the fifth novel from the Northern Irish Bennett (Havoc, in Its Third Year, 2004, etc.).
It’s March 1914, and St. Petersburg is in ferment. Pro-German and pro-French factions jockey for power as war looms; terrorists and revolutionaries are hard at work; Jews are being scapegoated. Yet our narrator, Dr. Otto Spethmann, born a Jew but not raised as one, remains serenely nonpolitical. A middle-aged widower, he lives with his daughter Catherine, a willful university student who he loves dearly. Otto is a respected psychoanalyst with some celebrity patients: Avrom Rozental, a Polish Jew favored to win the upcoming chess tournament; Anna Ziatdinov, a beautiful socialite, daughter of the reactionary industrialist Zinnurov; and Gregory Petrov, Bolshevik leader (Lenin is in exile). Otto is forced to acknowledge political strife by a visit from a police inspector, Lychev, who suspects Otto is linked to a plot to kill the Tsar. The idea is preposterous, but it turns out that Catherine has indeed been consorting with a would-be terrorist, now murdered. Otto’s serenity is further disturbed when armed intruders ransack his office for Rozental’s file. Bennett deftly splices the patients’ case histories with his fast-moving plot. Otto counsels the deeply disturbed Rozental not to play in the tournament, advice which will have explosive repercussions. He pinpoints the source of Anna’s trauma even as they become lovers and he runs afoul of her powerful father. Petrov, however, confident in public but a soul in torment in Otto’s study, remains an enigma. Otto is forced to make difficult moves in this human chess game, even as he plays an actual match with his famous violinist friend Kopelzon (in a treat for chess lovers, there are board-by-board reproductions of each move). A series of stunning surprises ends with Otto himself executing the key conspirator.
A hugely enjoyable, brilliant high-wire act.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-253-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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