If not entirely satisfying on its own, an excellent harbinger for books to come.
This debut is a paranormal thriller in which both the action and the questions don’t stop.
Retrieval expert Cas Russell is a weaponized mathematical genius: She sees numbers, equations, and vectors in everything and uses that knowledge and her superswift reflexes to dodge bullets, be in exactly the right place during a fight, and just generally exploit infinitesimally narrow windows of probability that no one else would perceive. Not even she can explain the source of her abilities. A brutally efficient and suspicious loner who doesn’t hesitate to kill under most circumstances, she trusts—at a visceral level beyond all reason—only one person, Rio, an even more ruthless and effective operative whose religious zealotry substitutes for a conscience. So she assumes that her latest job, referred to her by Rio, will be a routine one. But, it turns out, Rio is entirely ignorant of the mission, which is to rescue Courtney Polk, a seemingly naïve drug mule, from a Colombian cartel at the behest of Courtney’s sister, Dawna. Worse still, Dawna isn’t Courtney’s sister: She’s a telepath who can convince you of anything and an agent for Pithica, a well-connected organization with its sights on global domination (for the world’s own good, naturally). Although Rio asks her not to go after Pithica, Cas can’t help digging herself in deeper with the help of an inconveniently moral PI, especially when it becomes clear that Pithica has at least some interest in her. Cas is an awesome antiheroine, sympathetic despite her practical approach to violence, and her abilities make this book exciting, nasty fun, compensating in great part for the open-endedness of the plot, which raises more questions than it answers, both about who Cas and Rio truly are and about whether Pithica’s motives are as sincere as it claims. This is obviously the initial book in a series, establishing our cast and the mysteries we need to solve.
If not entirely satisfying on its own, an excellent harbinger for books to come.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18025-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.
Brown completes his science-fiction trilogy with another intricately plotted and densely populated tome, this one continuing the focus on a rebellion against the imperious Golds.
This last volume is incomprehensible without reference to the first two. Briefly, Darrow of Lykos, aka Reaper, has been “carved” from his status as a Red (the lowest class) into a Gold. This allows him to infiltrate the Gold political infrastructure…but a game’s afoot, and at the beginning of the third volume, Darrow finds himself isolated and imprisoned for his insurgent activities. He longs both for rescue and for revenge, and eventually he gets both. Brown is an expert at creating violent set pieces whose cartoonish aspects (“ ‘Waste ’em,’ Sevro says with a sneer” ) are undermined by the graphic intensity of the savagery, with razors being a favored instrument of combat. Brown creates an alternative universe that is multilayered and seething with characters who exist in a shadow world between history and myth, much as in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This world is vaguely Teutonic/Scandinavian (with characters such as Magnus, Ragnar, and the Valkyrie) and vaguely Roman (Octavia, Romulus, Cassius) but ultimately wholly eclectic. At the center are Darrow, his lover, Mustang, and the political and military action of the Uprising. Loyalties are conflicted, confusing, and malleable. Along the way we see Darrow become more heroic and daring and Mustang, more charismatic and unswerving, both agents of good in a battle against forces of corruption and domination. Among Darrow’s insights as he works his way to a position of ascendancy is that “as we pretend to be brave, we become so.”
An ambitious and satisfying conclusion to a monumental saga.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-345-53984-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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