Though the incessantly buzzing threat board may give you more headaches than thrills, the densely imagined counterterrorist...
A foiled Somali hijacking sets MI5’s Liz Carlyle (Dead Line, 2010, etc.) on the winding trail of international terrorists.
It’s nice that the pirates who attempted to seize the Aristides, a little ship carrying relief supplies on behalf of the United Charities’ Shipping Organization, were seized themselves instead. But the abortive attempt raises several puzzling questions. What was British grocery scion Amir Khan doing in such flagrantly illegal company? Why have hijackers been targeting UCSO ships lately, especially those with unusually high-value cargos? Is there a leak inside UCSO that’s tipping off its enemies? When Liz Carlyle interviews Amir in a French prison, his characterization of himself as an innocent bystander is so laughably glib that Liz is certain he’s linked to some nefarious plot. But her own colleagues are anything but helpful in connecting the dots. Mitchell Berger, who heads UCSO’s Athens office, never gets around to mentioning that he’s ex-CIA. Geoffrey Fane, Liz’s opposite number at MI6, who’d rather share his bed than his plans with her, secretly plants a junior op inside UCSO’s Athens office, then acts blandly surprised when she gets herself killed. Liz’s most readily forthcoming colleague is Salim Alavi, aka Boatman, an agent inside the Birmingham mosque at which he studied with Amir, who supplies useful intel right up until the moment his cover is blown. And when Fane urges that an agent be placed undercover on the next voyage of the Aristides, Liz insists that it be one of her own, intelligence officer Dave Armstrong, only to see him removed from the ship by pirates who clearly know what a prize they’ve captured. Luckily, Liz, equally undistracted by her conflicts with her alleged mates and her romance with her French counterpart Martin Seurat, remains all business and foils plot after plot.
Though the incessantly buzzing threat board may give you more headaches than thrills, the densely imagined counterterrorist culture Rimington creates beneath the tradecraft is as compelling as ever.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-489-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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