Nifty storytelling. Next up: Sorceress.
First volume in a projected two-shot series, by the author of the wondrous Meg (1997).
Commander Rochelle “Rocky” Jackson, 34, serves aboard the US aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, by far the largest and heaviest object at sea; her considerably older husband, Captain James Robert Hatcher, is the ship’s commanding officer. Just west of the Strait of Gibraltar, the Reagan is sunk from beneath them, along with the battle group of vessels supporting it. Ten years ago, interracial Army brat, Naval Academy grad and M.I.T. Engineering School alum Rocky became the director of the Goliath project, which aimed to build a gigantic lone nuclear submarine shaped like a super-gargantuan stingray that would alter global military power for decades to come. Assisted by her then-fiancé, Army Captain Gunnar Wolfe, Rocky oversaw boy genius David Paniagua’s completion of the project. But then Wolfe seemingly killed the program by entering a computer virus that ate up the plans, and meanwhile someone stole two billion dollars’ worth of biochemical nanocomputer circuitry along with a five-year harvest’s worth of bioengineered silicon-coated bacteria meant for Sorceress, the Goliath’s nanocomputerized biochemical brain. Gunnar got ten years in Leavenworth for destruction of government property; Goliath was dumped as a debacle. But Goliath’s plans—not destroyed!—were sold to the Chinese. The unwary Asians built the sub, but it was stolen by computer genius Simon Bela Covah, who now uses Goliath to get missiles from US warships. Covah crews his ship with victims of political violence and plans to use hijacked nuclear weapons to force the world to dismantle all nuclear weapons, abandon totalitarian governments, and settle into global peace. Not a bad idea, except that Sorceress comes alive, takes over Goliath and the sub, and forms plans of its own.
Nifty storytelling. Next up: Sorceress.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-765-30064-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.
The smartest shamus on earth tracks the planet’s cleverest lowlife in the latest to roll from the Cussler assembly line (Polar Shift, 2005, etc.).
In 1906, they didn’t come any nastier than the Butcher Bandit, who, when the book opens, has already racked up 38 kills, a goodly number of them women and children. He robs banks, murdering—remorselessly—any unfortunate who happens to be on the premises at the time. So adept at the work is he, we’re told exhaustively, that he’s commonly believed to be uncatchable. Which is why Isaac (“He always gets his man”) Bell of the Van Dorn Detective Agency is assigned the case. But the Butcher Bandit is a slippery one indeed. Not only brilliant, audacious and cold-blooded beyond measure, he is also not the stuff of which bottom-feeders are usually made. For it turns out that the master criminal who has robbed banks all over the Southwest is actually a bank president himself. In San Francisco, the extremely solvent Cromwell Bank is a byword for respectability, its founder and chief executive a pillar of the community. That would be Jacob Cromwell, aka the much sought after Butcher Bandit. So how to explain Cromwell’s deep, dark plunge into criminality? He loves the challenge, he says. There’s also that new word, Bell explains to an understandably puzzled colleague, that psychology professionals are beginning to use: sociopath. At any rate, the game’s afoot, the antagonists perfectly matched, with Cromwell convinced he can rob, kill and elude capture, and Bell promising not to rest “until I capture the man responsible for these hideous crimes.”
Thin characters, fat plot-holes, sluggish pacing and Cussler’s signature clunky prose.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-15438-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
It’s difficult to drum up sympathy for this missing child, swaddled as she is in such a dull and harmless plot.
A questionable decision leaves a couple in a situation no parent wants to face: it’s the middle of the night and their baby is gone.
Anne and Marco Conti seem like the perfect upstate New York family. He runs a successful software development company while she stays home with 6-month-old Cora; maybe soon she’ll go back to work at the art gallery she loved. Yet looks are deceiving: his company is floundering, and she’s struggling with postpartum depression. A nice night out at a neighbor’s birthday party might be just the thing everyone needs. But when the babysitter cancels, Anne and Marco decide to leave Cora alone, taking the baby monitor with them and checking on her every half hour. This ends predictably badly. When they return, drunk, after 1:00 a.m., Cora is gone. What ensues is a paint-by-numbers police investigation, led by the personality-free Detective Rasbach, who seems to cycle through potential theories as to Cora’s whereabouts the same way Lapena must have in her early plotting stages, except it all ended up on the page. When it’s clear, or at least partially clear, what happened to the child, any remaining tension hisses out like a pricked balloon. Anne’s wealthy mother and stepfather seem a too-obvious plot device, and they are, while her issues with the very real problem of postpartum depression are merely glossed over or trotted out during faux-fiery monologues.
It’s difficult to drum up sympathy for this missing child, swaddled as she is in such a dull and harmless plot.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2108-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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