A suspenseful thriller featuring an unsympathetic but effective defender against threats to the nation.
In the second of Snyder’s (The President’s Weapon, 2015) series, a covert group hopes to thwart terrorists planning a biological attack on America.
When President Robert Williams gets wind of an unusually massive fish kill in Alaska, he assumes the worst and contacts his clandestine unit for locating and eliminating terrorists. The group, under the authority of the newly formed Department of the Presidential Office, is known only to Williams and its four members, led by retired U.S. Marine Capt. Richard Starr. Hacker Darlene Phillips quickly confirms a potential bioweapon when she spots, via satellite imagery, a person wearing a hazmat suit throwing an item into an Alaskan lake. The Centers for Disease Control later surmise that the item contained a toxin that activates in water and subsequently disintegrates. Starr’s group, which also includes former Marine sniper Marvin Styles and pilot J.C. Christman, also faces a rather significant, unexpected hurdle: the CIA. Its director, Bernard Backersley, felt left out of the loop during Starr’s last mission, and he enlists cyberunit head Myra Banks to look into Phillips, his former operative. Soon, Starr’s entire team is under CIA surveillance and dodging nosy agents who get in the way of their investigation. Meanwhile, the Iraqi Republican Guard is plotting another strike. This action-packed novel maintains a steady pace, thanks in part to Snyder providing a countdown to the Iraqi attack, which is mere days away. Major character Styles is the definitive antihero, readily acknowledging that he functions as the team’s killer: “it’s a job I just happen to do well.” His actions are sometimes morally dubious, such as when he ruthlessly kills a few CIA agents for, essentially, their lack of cooperation. His apparent invulnerability, however, gradually reduces the suspense; even when he’s unarmed with a gun in his face, he defends himself with the greatest of ease. The team, though, is always kept in danger, particularly as Backersley becomes dead-set on proving the existence of the president’s covert unit. The ending sets up another sequel—bad guys are still out there, including a villain that’s sure to become the most formidable of the series.
A suspenseful thriller featuring an unsympathetic but effective defender against threats to the nation.Pub Date: May 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9561-3
Page Count: 310
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2016
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
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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