Hunter (Sniper’s Honor, 2014, etc.) sets aside long guns and MST-100 scopes for a Sheffield blade and then follows Jack the Ripper into the mean streets of Victorian London.
"I owe it all to Jack," says Jeb. I will "never, ever return to being the nonentity I had been my first 32 years." Jeb (a nom de plume) is an acerbic part-time music critic for London’s evening tabloid, Star, when he's assigned a story about prostitutes—Judys—being murdered in Whitecastle, hangout of "boardwalkers, strawers, grease removers...nostrum vendors, fortune-tellers, French polishers...[and] various classes of lurkers and peepers." London’s 1888 autumn of blood unreels through Jeb’s memoir, Jack’s purloined diary, and letters from Mairsian, a gin-addled Judy. Mixed in with fog-clamped alleyways, brick alcoves, and Jack’s gory knife work is a bit of Hunter's humor; noting a corpse’s missing organs, Jeb says, "Or he’s eaten them already, with a fine claret and field beans from the South of France." A snob, a wicked ironic wit, Jeb thinks he possesses a "higher mental function, exposure to education, mastery of culture." The supercilious hack’s name—and what’s to be made of the memoir—is a surprise when finally revealed. Jeb and his co-investigator, professor of phonetics Thomas Dare, conclude that Jack "is the consequence of empire" and find suspicious characters among British Afghan veterans. That allows Hunter, considering British generalship, to "cast a snide eye on Queen Vicky’s propensity to have a Tommy stick a bayonet in the guts of every yellow, black, or brown heathen who defied her." Add Sherlock Holmes, deductive reasoning, a classic frame-up, spot-on Cockney dialogue, erudite social observations, and pervasive anti-Semitism, and Bob’s your uncle.
Hunter solves the crime, and the Prince of Wales wasn’t the culprit.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6485-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
77
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A serial killer with a sense of history is the baddie in this latest from Baldacci, one of the reigning kings of potboilers (Split Second, 2003, etc.).
He kills, he leaves clues, he flatters through imitation: Son of Sam, the San Francisco Zodiac killer, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gracy, and so on down a sanguinary list of accredited members of the Monsters’ Hall of Fame. Suddenly, the landscape of poor little Wrightsburg, Virginia, is littered with corpses, and ex-Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have their hands full. That’s because bewildered, beleaguered Chief of Police Todd Williams has turned to the newly minted private investigating firm of King and Maxwell for desperately needed (unofficial) help. Even these ratiocinative wizards, however, admit to puzzlement. “But I'm not getting this,” says Michelle. “Why commit murders in similar styles to past killers as a copycat would and then write letters making it clear you’re not them?” Excellent question, and it goes pretty much unanswered. Never mind—enter the battling Battles, a family with the requisite number of sins and secrets to qualify fully as hot southern Gothic and to prop up a plot in need. Bobby Battles, the patriarch, is bedridden, but Remmy, his wife, is one lively mischief-making steel magnolia. She’s brought breaking-and-entering charges against decent local handyman Junior Deaver, who as a result languishes in the county jail. Convinced of his innocence, Junior’s lawyer hires King & Maxwell to sniff around for exculpatory evidence. Well, will the two plot streams flow together? You betcha. Will the copycat-serial-killer at one point decide that King and Maxwell are just too clever to live? Inevitably. And when at last that CCSK’s identity is revealed and his crimes explained (talkily and tediously), will readers be satisfied? Only the charitable among them.
Lame but, like its predecessors, bound for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53108-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Categories: THRILLER
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