A scorching tale that, despite sadistic acts inflicted on its characters, manages to be uplifting.
Irish’s latest thriller concerns a private sector of the CIA monitoring citizens for a study on gun violence.
Former U.S. Army Col. Devlin McConnelly is on the run from Henri Edwards North America, which had employed Devlin to collect intel for a CIA study on gun control. Devlin is aware of deficiencies with the study. But the program continues to recruit, enlisting Lorabell Cardigan, a professor of behavioral science, to ensure those susceptible to gun violence are given ample opportunity to crack—for data to use in the company’s study. Irish’s (The Golden Goose of Los Angeles, 2013, etc.) novel is a riveting narrative that on occasion comes across as a short story collection since there are several self-contained subplots—a mystical priestess targets a drug cartel in Costa Rica; an American businessman endures ritual torture in a brutal ceremony; and Devlin dodges would-be assassins. The book shifts focus from Devlin, the best (and most morally sound) character, for nearly half of the narrative before he finally returns in full force—attacking a CIA facility and engaging in a blistering action sequence set at a mall. The novel’s best scenes involve Lorabell at the Observation Datacenter keeping a watch on four case studies with the potential for gun violence: a burn victim and survivor of a motorcycle collision; a man who lost his wife to cancer and his daughter to a bus accident; a Marine whose wife was raped while he was overseas; and a mentally unstable woman whose husband left her for her sister. These scenes are often cruel and memorable—CIA assets psychologically torment the widower, for instance, by aiming some of the harassment at his girlfriend and his dog. Irish leaves room for another installment in the series, but he leaves a few too many things unanswered, including any indication as to the priestess’s origins, and while a notable villain gets comeuppance, Devlin isn’t given closure. Regardless, readers will be ready for the series to continue.
A scorching tale that, despite sadistic acts inflicted on its characters, manages to be uplifting.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492367741
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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