A fast-paced tale that should appeal to war buffs, military enthusiasts, and armchair patriots.
The U.S. military fights Russia in a war “with all odds stacked against it.”
Isaacs’ debut novel starts off with a bang: a terrorist attack that shatters “the signing of a landmark peace accord” between Syria’s ruling regime and its opponents. Syrian President Saad Hafez al-Abid miraculously escapes harm, but the Russian foreign minister is among the dead. Blaming Turkey and its ally, the U.S., the Russian president vows to retaliate. Excerpts from newspaper accounts chart the ramping tensions—suicide bombings, an attack on a mosque—as the Russian military is put on its highest alert, culminating in threats that a U.S.-Russia war “is only days away.” From the Air Command and Control Centre in Italy to the Mediterranean Sea, from the Turkey-Armenia border to the Persian Gulf, and from an aircraft carrier to the war-torn skies over Syria, the conflict unfolds from myriad perspectives, including the top brass and the warriors on the ground, at sea, and in the air. Cecil Perdue Jr., “a full-bird colonel” and distinguished fighter pilot now riding a desk as one of the directors of a NATO facility in Italy, guides the operations. Pilot Tracey “Turbo” Foster, “stunningly beautiful” with “a resolve of steel,” lives up to her nickname. Other major players include Maj. Samuel McFarlane, fighter pilot Maj. Edward “Ripper” Ripland, and Navy SEAL Brett Mason, heroes all. Outside of physical descriptions, these characters are defined solely by their actions in battle (a downed enemy fighter pilot “would surely get a heart attack too if he came to know somehow that a woman had stitched his ass, Tracey thought in amusement”). In his rousing story, Isaacs more than satisfies the need for speed, but he also writes authentically about the punishing physical tolls of flying (“She was jarred to the bones.…The excruciating G-forces slammed her hard against the seat back and nearly knocked the wind out of her”). But the author seems much more at home deftly crafting the book’s prodigious battle sequences (“The sidelobes were being suppressed and blanked, leading at one stage, he noticed, to an increase in the main beam width”) than he is with producing a bracing sex scene between Tracey and her lover, another pilot (“He descended on her womanhood”).
A fast-paced tale that should appeal to war buffs, military enthusiasts, and armchair patriots.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 433
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2018
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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