A complex tale with plenty to say about a complicated era.
Doulis (The Iron Storm, 2011, etc.) quickly thrusts readers into the far-reaching political tensions and fears of the 1970s in this conspiracy thriller.
Lee Straton, Mona Paterson, and Holly Laver find their friend, professor Josh Andrews, in a grisly state following a break-in and assault at his house. But although Lee could obsess over his own impending breakup with Holly, or the apparent romantic feelings between his sister-in-law Mona and the injured professor, he’s determined to get to the bottom of the strange crime instead. This clearly isn’t just a random rural act of violence, as the police assume, although Lee isn’t certain what his own instincts, honed by military training and a stretch in prison, are telling him. With the country becoming increasingly divided over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the fallout from the Watergate scandal, it’s no wonder Lee suspects that the professor, with his radical political leanings, might have a target on his back. As paranoia over government surveillance mounts, Straton’s investigation yields more questions, and it begins to seem that the attack on Andrews was just the beginning of something far more sinister. Overall, the novel takes its twists and turns hard and fast. However, Doulis also accentuates the workings of Lee’s keen analytical mind with thorough, highly detailed descriptions, such as this one of a stack of mail: “The mail had come an hour before his nap and he had put it all on the large platter near the door. There was a card from his daughter, Helen; they were back in Paris and would stay there for the last two weeks. Among the other post was an over-size envelope marked ‘insufficient postage.’ ” The sheer volume of such observations can be overwhelming, but the novel’s brisk pace keeps readers guessing about just how important any specific detail will be. This keeps the events moving forward, even in the sections of the book that contain less action. Above all, the story succeeds at creating feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, and the mystery gives Lee plenty of reasons to give in to his own doubts.
A complex tale with plenty to say about a complicated era.Pub Date: March 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-1467-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2016
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
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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