An ambitious but awkwardly executed thriller.
In Sutcliffe’s debut novel, spoiled rich kids take nuclear Armageddon into their own hands.
Luther Michael Brethren loves his guitar. He’s in a band named Lybyrty and has speakers hanging from the trees in his absent parents’ backyard; he also has a bunch of friends who spend their time hang gliding, selling drugs and talking about the state of the world. The friends call themselves the Children of Atom and claim to have been warped by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an event none of them were alive to witness. When two of their acquaintances plan a plutonium heist, the four Children of Atom want in. They plan to use the plutonium to destroy an unlikely target—the small town of Titan—to “dispel delusions of peace and security everywhere.” They go on to raid a drug kingpin’s house to steal cocaine, which they plan to sell in order to buy some plutonium; later, they decide to steal the plutonium as well. Remarkably, the friends know exactly how to pull off a heist of this nature—all are firearms experts, and no one has any remorse about killing, except Michael, who is haunted by the death of the kingpin’s mistress. The novel spirals into farce when the isotope winds up stored in Michael’s house. Soon after, a freak storm occurs, causing all sorts of chaos, including the impalement of one of Michael’s friends and the destruction of Michael’s greenhouse where he had been clandestinely growing marijuana; Michael’s parents, supposedly in Europe for five more months, pick that moment to return home. Michael soon leaves everything behind and splits for Europe, as he doesn't want to be held accountable for the destruction The Children of Atom are about to unleash. The story struggles with stilted dialogue that has characters often pontificating instead of simply conversing. Readers may be confused by the novel’s inadequate scene-setting, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what’s going on. Intermittent flashbacks and “interludes” further confuse the action, and, as a result, readers may find this short novel’s warring storylines hard to follow.
An ambitious but awkwardly executed thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2002
ISBN: 978-0595216017
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Writer's Showcase Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
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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