Amateur avengers with special talents team up to bring down traffickers in human body parts—in a chilling medical thriller from Chiu (Port Arthur Chicken, 1979, etc.). When a teenager from the Mexican village where he's been sent by MÇdecins Sans Frontiäres disappears on his way to the US, Dr. Nguyen-Anh Dupree asks hacker friends in Los Angeles for help in determining the boy's fate. The coed computer wizards Ignacio Tejada (a grad student whose brother heads one of the city's toughest gangs) and Phillipa (Leepi) Walker (employed in the motion-picture industry) accept the challenge. But the cyberspace trail dead-ends at Caduceus 21 (a closely held HMO) and MedEx (another extremely private transnational enterprise that specializes in flying transplant organs from donors to recipients). Meanwhile, investment banker Maggie Sepulveda is vetting C 21, which needs to raise expansion capital. The supposedly routine examination takes an unexpected turn when one of her subordinates unearths evidence that the health-care concern may be cooking its books. After the hapless auditor is murdered and Dupree (now on home leave) apprises her of his own suspicions, the fledgling financier quickly joins forces with an Amerasian physician, Nacio, and Leepi. The foursome soon smokes out the real villain of the piece, a nonagenarian billionaire known as Century Chisolm, who holds controlling interests in both C 21 and MedEx. With his anonymity in jeopardy, the rogue industrialist desperately tries to keep the lid on. Chisolm's personal intervention proves unavailing, however, as the quartet succeed in rescuing Maggie's mom (who's been abducted), hacking into ultrasecret memory banks, learning the details of a custom-killing operation that provides contraband body parts on demand, and arranging for incriminating corporate data to be transferred to computer files maintained by the Justice Department. At the close, moreover, they impose an appallingly appropriate punishment on Chisolm for institutionalizing a black market in replacement organs. An engrossing and literate shocker.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-553-10283-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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