A smartly restrained and persistently witty crime tale even at its grimmest.
For a British journalist, maintaining a career and financial stability can be murder—and may even call for it—in this thriller.
Though Martin’s two years older than Financial Review co-worker Tom de Lacy, it’s the latter who gets the coveted industrial correspondent’s job. The magazine’s editor effectively demotes Martin, who’s married with twin daughters, to subeditor, where he resents Tom and discreetly sabotages his copy. As Tom’s career soars, including a gig as a TV reporter, Martin takes a personal and professional nose dive, eventually becoming unemployed with his wife and children gone. The news gets worse: Martin’s terminally ill father, Simon, has changed his will, giving his house and half his estate to his younger brother, Walter, who’s just returned after inexplicably disappearing years ago. Desperate for money, Martin convinces Caroline, one of his two sisters, that enlisting a heavy to scare Uncle Walter out of the house is a good idea. Shortly thereafter, Martin hits a wave of good fortune, starting behind the scenes on a TV show and winding up in front of the camera. But hired heavy Jebb complicates matters by becoming smitten with Caroline. Martin’s potentially hot new story involving a pharmaceutical company, meanwhile, has ties to a recent murder—and he certainly doesn’t want authorities digging anywhere near him. Claver’s (Hider/Seeker, 2015) story is quietly chaotic, a series of events unfolding organically. Martin, for example, handles one problem at a time, such as his inability to get a hold of Jebb to verify that he’s only strong-arming Walter. Likewise, Martin’s solid under pressure and often funny. When Jebb hears Caroline’s voice over the phone, after Martin says she’s out of the country, the journalist tells him: “No, it’s my other sister, the ugly one.” Martin’s brisk, generally wry first-person narrative makes him an easy protagonist to root for, regardless of his questionable acts, while Tom, quite frankly, deserves the protagonist’s rancor. The somewhat ambiguous ending is striking, a lasting impression revealing what’s most important to Martin.
A smartly restrained and persistently witty crime tale even at its grimmest.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
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
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