An experimental drug revives the assassinated U.S. president, who’s suddenly hellbent on world domination, in Richardson’s debut thriller.
President Alexander Scott Holden doesn’t survive an assassin’s bullets. But brother and National Security Agency Director Tom Holden needs him alive for at least a few more days to follow through with a plan to solidify America’s economic stability. A small group agrees to the administering of a necrosis treatment in the early stages of development. It works, and the president eventually regains his mental capacity. But something’s wrong, apart from his emaciated, undeadlike appearance. The commander in chief is slowly amassing a horde of the undead, and an unforeseen military assault against Haiti is just the beginning of a plot that might entail taking over the world. Despite the undead villains, the novel has more signs of a political thriller than any other genre. The president’s secret reanimation, for one, smells more like a coverup than dead flesh, while he faces off against radicals, the Free Reign Movement, who are possibly behind the assassination with a mole inside the White House. Richardson, regardless of the playful title, takes the horror element seriously, largely avoiding the Z-word and using scientific descriptions to detail undead symptoms. A doctor discussing Holden’s condition, for example, notes “that even modest doses of any kind of stimulant result in acute physical excitation,” i.e., the president is, at first, a biter. The story, however, doesn’t leave much room for humor or nuanced character relationships. But tabloid journalist Grace Livy is a highlight, sneaking over to Haiti to investigate what seem to be walking corpses and even involved in a (mostly implied) love triangle with reporters Danny Chase and John “Jacko” Ledbetter. Richardson pulls away from genre conventions: the formerly dead president isn’t a mindless animated cadaver, and some of the undead are actually living people who’ve become unwitting participants in the drug trials. In the end, the president’s actions could result in a global war, and though an undead apocalypse could happen, it’s the real-world threat that packs the most punch.
The undead are just another government conspiracy in this solid, politically infused novel.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4969-7221-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
79
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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