Builds Dedman's fan base but adds no luster to his oeuvre.
Sequel to Australian Dedman's debut thriller, The Art of Arrow Cutting (1997), a Stoker Award finalist, again features freelance photographer Michelangelo “Mage” Magistrale.
Charlie Takumo, a martial arts stuntman, joins public defender Kelly Barbet (both from the first novel), who earlier defended Mage against a murder charge. Mage vanished two years ago but works in Canadian refugee camps and tries to master two magical foci he came into and then use them to conquer diseases like AIDS and cancer. The pot bubbles hard as Satanist vampire/sorcerer Solomon Tudor wrests his two-year-old son from his young mother, Angela, herself an adept at magic. And Kelly Barbet (dark-chocolate and 6’2”) must now defend night nurse Gaye Lind, who has been arrested on suspicion of body-snatching after having taken a photograph of a ten-year-old boy's corpse standing on a ledge outside her second-floor apartment window—body laid open, intestines looped about. The boy had been Gaye's patient, but at death his body was stolen from the hospital during an autopsy that was looking into the wasting disease (anemic anoxia) that killed him and is now killing his parents. The lost body turned up in a storm drain, beheaded, with a bulb of garlic sewn into its mouth. Meanwhile, Mage has killed the Japanese-American mobster Tatsuo Tamenaga, and is pursued by the mobster's daughter, Haruko, 28, who inherits her father's yakuza empire. She hires polished assassin Valerie Krieg to track down and kill Mage—on sight, because he can disappear in a finger-snap. Assassins and vampires are already trying to kill Charlie Takumo, who is helping Kelly Barbet investigate the crazy photograph: How had the body been shot on the ledge, and whose red eyes are those mirrored in the window? At last Kelly and Charlie face a coven of female vampires, some having a tea-party in a sewer, while Mage faces Haruko and asks for a truce.
Builds Dedman's fan base but adds no luster to his oeuvre.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87783-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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