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SANTE FE RULES

Woods (New York Dead, 1991, etc.) may hail from Sante Fe, but he doesn't do his hometown much honor with this slack mystery/homage. Even Sante Fe's gorgeous desert setting fades against the blinding silliness of Woods's plotting here. A nifty premise sets up the story: Middle-aged film producer Wolf Willett, stranded at the Grand Canyon, opens a New York Times to read that his gorgeous young wife, Julia, his best pal, and...himself! have been shot dead at his Sante Fe home. But rather than run with that kick-off by having Wolf stay officially dead and investigate the murders incognito, Woods has his hero fly on to L.A.—and finish work on his latest movie. A week or so later, Wolf returns to Sante Fe and, anticipating legal trouble, hires legendary defense lawyer Ed Eagle—a 6'7'' tower of chutzpa who's the only character here who rises above clichÇ. Under Ed's expensive guidance, Wolf manages temporarily to stave off arrest for triple-murder by the suspicious local cops, who finally figure out that the body misidentified as Wolf is really that of the sleazy ex-husband of Julia's nearly identical sister, Barbara—who shows up and begins a fling with Ed Eagle. Meanwhile, Wolf's psychiatrist is murdered. Finally arrested for the triple-slaying, Wolf is tossed into jail—and learns that Julia stole his $3.5 million savings just before she died. Fortunately, a former IRS agent retrieves Wolf's money, and, while in jail, Wolf is adopted by a biker named Spider, who, impressed that Wolf once shook hands with Madonna, offers help that proves invaluable after someone puts out a contract on Wolf—someone who looks a lot like Barbara/Julia.... All this cockeyed mayhem sorts out in the end, of course, as Woods winds up with this happy sentence starring Wolf's pet pooch: ``Flaps lifted her head and grinned at everybody''—a fitting conclusion to this shaggy-dog story of a novel, a shockingly poor showing from an author who's sometimes (e.g., Chiefs; Under the Lake) terrific.

Pub Date: June 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-06-017963-5

Page Count: 320

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992

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DEVOLUTION

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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