A by-the-numbers actioner that seeks to justify the brutal body count with a thin, cynically applied scrim of sermonizing.
Silencers go thwapp! in the night as the Church fights to save a precious artifact from the hands of evil.
Monteleone’s latest religious thriller (after The Reckoning, 1999, etc.) kicks off in Portugal, circa 1922, where some shadowy thugs destroy a shrine to the Virgin Mary, leaving only a shard of supposedly miraculous stained glass that show the eyes of Mary. Cut to the present day, a time when a Freemason-like, centuries-old cabal of devilish industrialists called the Guild is murdering Church operatives who stand between them and the glass, hoping to turn its powers (which include foretelling the future) to their own needs. One dark night in New Hampshire, Kate Harrison suffers the murders of both her sister and her husband, and would have been killed herself had it not been for p.i. and ex-Navy SEAL Matt Etchison, who’s pretty handy with an Uzi. It turns out that Kate’s brother-in-law Domenic Petralli is a member of the Knights of Malta, who operate as a sort of shadow army for the Vatican. Standing between Kate & Co. and the Eyes of the Virgin is the almost infinite—but godless—power of the octopus-like Guild. Fortunately, the Knights have more weaponry and gadgetry at their disposal than a decade’s worth of James Bondses and are more than willing to help Kate find her killers. Monteleone knows how to play the international spy-hopper game, taking us from Poland to Corsica to ravishing little cafes in Italy, but has a tendency to shore up his often-flagging plot by bringing on the black helicopters and blazing automatic weaponry. What’s truly disturbing is not the ultra-rightist religious content here—which makes itself known mostly by the occasional muttered comment about arrogant Jesuits and foolish atheists—but how little of it there is. Monteleone is much more interested in keeping the bullets flying than in organically integrating his pro-Church views into the blood-soaked narrative.
A by-the-numbers actioner that seeks to justify the brutal body count with a thin, cynically applied scrim of sermonizing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-87874-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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