An involving tale that proves a modest artifact can lead to a grand adventure.
A historical incident influences a modern economic conspiracy in this thriller.
In the third volume of his Matt Hawkins series, Richardson (Abolition of Evil, 2016, etc.) shows how what was thought to be a myth can impede a foreign power’s attempt to take over the world economy. Matt gets pulled away from his sedate life as an antiques dealer in Savannah, Georgia, after Adam Hampton, his college roommate, commits suicide. Adam’s death feels wrong to Matt. Adam’s sister, Kate, who Matt meets again at the funeral, agrees: “ ‘I don't think Adam jumped in front of that train,’ she stated evenly. ‘I think he was pushed. In fact, I'm sure of it.’ ” As the two cohorts, who become romantically involved, begin poking around into what Adam was working on, bad things start happening to them. After her apartment gets trashed, Kate discovers a clue among Adam’s effects—an old map of New Mexico with “Geronomo’s Gold” written on it. Kate, Matt, and his mentor, Buzz Penberthy, a member of the secret society The Ring, figure out that the map has something to do with a present-day scheme involving gold. But they can’t put all of the pieces together until Matt meets with Adam’s boss, James Sinclair, who nervously lays out the situation for him: “The Chinese want more control. They want to be the world’s greatest superpower, but they recognize they can only achieve that goal if they have the world’s dominant currency.” The race is on to find Geronimo’s Gold and save the United States from becoming a second-rate economic power. Richardson has done an admirable job creating a thoughtful thriller. While he doesn’t skimp on action, he skillfully employs flashbacks so that readers understand how the activities of Geronimo, Theodore Roosevelt, and a Sinclair ancestor affect contemporary events. The characters are largely engaging, even secondary ones, such as Geronimo’s descendant Kenny Morgan, although the villains, a greedy trader and a bunch of interchangeable Chinese officials, remain fairly one-dimensional. Best of all, the author makes economics enjoyable, no mean feat. Richardson leaves readers wondering what nugget from history will next lure Matt from his antiques shop.
An involving tale that proves a modest artifact can lead to a grand adventure.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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