A tautly written thriller propelled by sharp writing and an ever complicating plot.
Byrne (Skin in the Game, 2015) returns to the world of renegade whistleblower Joe Hawkins in this new ecological thriller.
On the outskirts of a Lakota reservation in South Dakota, a boy witnesses a shocking murder right before a train derails and spills its shipment of oil. Thousands of miles away, at the edge of an Icelandic glacier, two exiles hide from their past. Joe is a former analyst for the U.S. State Department and an Oxford University professor who was recently imprisoned and forced to watch his girlfriend tortured and killed by people connected to Mandrake Resources, a fuel extraction company whose corruption he uncovered. Kate Farrow is an ex–MI6 psychiatrist who helped Joe escape but who can never return home to England because she disobeyed her employers: “She liked to consider herself resilient, but what do you do when you can no longer be the person you have spent a lifetime training to be?” The answer comes from an old ally, who suggests that Joe and Kate sneak into the United States in order to hook up with the activist environmental group Green Way, which is waging a campaign against Mandrake. The situation with Green Way turns out to be stranger than the pair expected, but it presents an opportunity to finally put Mandrake out of business. They must work quickly before an international cabal succeeds in eliminating them. Byrne writes in a precise prose that gives his story a deadly serious tone, even in those moments when the plot drifts into unlikely territory. He excels at placing his characters in environments in which the starkly drawn landscapes highlight the precarious lives they lead. “How do you fit the world into a story?” wonders one activist while talking about the subject of climate-change denial. “And how do you fit story into the world?” The world of Byrne’s novel is balanced on the edge of a cliff—and its story will hold readers captive for as long as it takes for that world to right itself.
A tautly written thriller propelled by sharp writing and an ever complicating plot.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 397
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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