When the playlist at the end of the book is the highlight, you know you've got problems.
Scottish journalist Allie Burns reports on—and becomes entangled with—various gloomy events of 1989.
It was the year between the Lockerbie bombing and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a year of increasing AIDS deaths and no progress on treatment. A year when nearly a hundred fans were trampled at a football match in Sheffield. It was the year of many depressing developments, and McDermid has made poor Allie Burns slog through many of them, with very little of the suspense that made 1979 (2021), the first installment of her series, a page-turner. Back in '79, Allie met a lovely woman and realized that she was gay, which was fun. In '89, Allie and Rona are living together in cozy domesticity, eating a lot of rolls and processed cheese. The villain of this book, whose murder we see orchestrated in a prologue, is Allie's boss, media mogul Ace Lockhart. Lockhart has bought the news organization Allie works for and fired everyone but her, but this is only the least of his many crimes. This character is so uniformly bad that it's almost funny. "That evening, there was a letter from a philanthropist he’d met a few times, seeking a donation to his charity supporting Ethiopian Jews still recovering from the famine. Lockhart screwed it into a ball and tossed it in the bin. He was choosy about the charities he supported; he couldn’t see the point unless there was a way of finessing something in it for him." Of course he couldn't. He is a man who "seize[s] life by the throat," "snatch[es] opportunity from the jaws of defeat," and has many other clichés to embody, so don't waste his time with feckless famine victims. (The author will likely side with her character Rona here; when accused by Allie of mixing metaphors, she retorts "Oh, fuck off, Margaret Atwood.") The book's action climax takes place in East Germany, a setting so colorless and dull that two separate kidnappings can't raise the pulse of the narrative. Plodding mechanically and at undue length through her well-researched historical plot points, McDermid seems to have phoned this one in.
When the playlist at the end of the book is the highlight, you know you've got problems.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-6010-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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