A wildly creative thriller that attempts to cram too many threads into an already packed and harrowing storyline.
A time-traveling novel centers on turmoil in the near future.
It is the year 2025, and exactly 140 meteoroids are headed toward Earth. Life, as humans know it, may very well cease to exist by the winter solstice. Added to the trouble is the fact that the solstice will involve a celestial alignment “considered to presage an apocalyptic event.” Pope John Paul III, a frail though amiable pontiff, encourages the world to pray, though it seems that more drastic action may be necessary. Meanwhile, a strange blackthorn tree has sprouted from the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. It is a sight that mystifies people and enrages a blood-drinking cardinal who, along with his equally sinister dwarf sidekick, Brother Alaimo, teams up with a mysterious woman named Lebhudha (aka “the Dragon Queen”) to engage in money laundering and prevent a resurgence of the Roman Catholic Church in China. The only hope seems to come from a grumpy German archbishop named Regenmacher and his Irish assistant as they seek to find lost religious artifacts that just might save the world. Events in 2025 are, however, merely the tip of the iceberg in this raucous adventure that spans time periods, encompassing the days of Eden, Gilgamesh, and Noah. Readers who at the outset think a quick resolution may be around the corner concerning those 140 meteoroids will instead find themselves redirected through detours that include a curse of Cain, questionable ethics among Vatican relations with mobsters, and a brief suggestion that Pope John Paul I was murdered. Burch’s (Romancing Boudica, 2014, etc.) ambitious tale is a starkly imaginative mix with a colorful, wide-ranging cast. But it is easy to get lost in the fray. With so many locations, topics, and conflicts, narrowing it all down to a single, discernible narrative is not a simple task. Dialogue is often obvious, as when a female pope asserts: “I’ll do my best to create an education system so women can participate in our religious community.” This type of statement gives some inventive portions a blunt quality that will likely fail to dazzle the audience.
A wildly creative thriller that attempts to cram too many threads into an already packed and harrowing storyline.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 686
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
