A fast-paced thriller whose unwieldy plot is redeemed by sustained suspense and authentic bayou menace.
In Bridges’ relentless thriller, a DEA agent finds herself on a doomed raid in the Louisiana bayou, besieged by enemies on all sides.
DEA Special Agent Jennifer Nash is reeling after the disastrous conclusion of a surveillance mission that left her partner, and maybe her career, dead. Made a scapegoat and placed on forced leave, Jennifer is given a lifeline in the form of Project Deliverance, a high-profile operation targeting the transportation networks that sustain Mexican drug trafficking organizations throughout Louisiana. Not one to take a break, Jennifer heads to Baton Rouge, where Lt. Lincoln Chaffee and a team of local law enforcement officers, including Trooper Corey and Senior Trooper Walter Kershaw, are preparing to venture deep into Cajun country. Jennifer knows little about the world she’s entering. There, she finds hungover, loud-mouthed cops and locals with a distinctive drawl (one resident shrugs off Hurricane Katrina with the observation, “Dis place?…Is my home. And Katrina all we got out here was a little rain”). Alongside Chaffee’s Special Operations team, Jennifer is tasked with helping dismantle the Bass family operation, a target Chaffee insists is “not some Chemistry 101 mobile lab or Nazi Method trailer park” but rather “a substantial cook site” hidden deep in the Louisiana bayou. As Jennifer and the team head into the swamps, Bridges alternates between the present-day investigation and the history of Victor Bass and his sons, who were all raised on stories of violence and retribution. When Project Deliverance collapses in spectacular fashion, Jennifer, Corey, and several others find themselves stranded in the bayou, cut off from support and uncertain who among their supposed allies can be trusted. Pursued by criminals and hostile locals, the survivors struggle to navigate a landscape where every encounter could be deadly. With each step forward they take, they risk falling into a different (and dangerous) group’s territory.
Bridges wastes little time in getting into the action. The operation is executed with a razor’s-edge tension that the novel maintains as Jennifer is thrust from one dangerous situation into another. The author has an impressive handle on action sequences, though the violence he portrays can border on the extreme. Jennifer is an appealing protagonist, tough and intelligent without being invincible. (“Jennifer Nash was a follower who always helped lead. She was a leader who never let it go to her head. And at all times she was her own woman,” Bridges writes, summing her up neatly.) The Cajun setting is particularly well rendered, with plenty of authenticity and flavor. What begins as a cartel thriller evolves into a backwoods survival story—the operation’s name, Project Deliverance, surely being a nod to the similarly titled film—involving corrupt cops, religious fanatics, and other violent outlaw factions. The result is impressively imaginative but often feels out of control. Plot threads feel too easily tossed out as the narrative repeatedly veers gleefully in wholly new directions, leaving the novel to ultimately feel like less than the sum of its parts—though it still delivers an exciting, vividly realized ride through the bayou. A fast-paced thriller whose unwieldy plot is redeemed by sustained suspense and authentic bayou menace.Pub Date: May 25, 2026
ISBN: 9781509265411
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
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