A former criminal lawyer, seeking vengeance against the man she believes is responsible for her sister’s suicide, gets entangled with dangerous culprits in this thriller.
Oregonian Angeline Porter is visiting Paris, but she’s not there for sightseeing or romance. The ex-attorney is hunting Gerard Duvernet, the married Frenchman who had an affair with her sister, Sophie. She blames him for Sophie’s tragic decision to kill herself as well as the unborn child Angeline assumes was Gerard’s. Under the pretense that she’s journalist Helen Craig, Angeline plans to murder him with poison, but the charismatic Frenchman isn’t the monster she anticipated. Moreover, after finally deciphering Sophie’s laptop and cellphone passcodes, she discovers startling new information that could change everything. Back home, Angeline’s chemical engineer husband, Hank, suffers a debilitating injury. To cover the costly treatment, Angeline goes to great, potentially immoral lengths. Unfortunately, certain individuals linked to Sophie and Gerard eventually track her down, thinking she, for starters, has access to a sizable bank account. Before long, Angeline finds herself immersed in a whirlwind of deceit, theft, blackmail, and worse. Murder may soon even prove a necessity, though not out of a sense of retribution, but rather mere self-preservation. Brooks’ (A Killing in Kauai, 2018, etc.) book, compiling a trilogy of preceding novellas featuring Angeline, is filled with genuinely surprising plot turns. What’s on Sophie’s cellphone, for example, takes the story in an entirely new direction. But it’s the protagonist who will astonish readers the most. Angeline is ethically ambivalent: A rapist client at her old law firm receives due punishment courtesy of her illicit deed. She nevertheless remains appealing throughout, as she readily acknowledges her flaws. Bolstering those traits is Angeline’s frank and distinctive first-person narration: “Somehow, I’ve now turned into an observer of my life, the emotions sitting deep inside me like a vault.” The work concludes with an exposition-heavy wrap-up that’s likewise absorbing and logically sound.
A zigzagging tale reinforced by a striking and complicated protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Black Leather Jacket Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
11
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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. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Two defrocked Secret Service Agents investigate the assassination of one presidential candidate and the kidnapping of another.
Baldacci (The Christmas Train, 2002, etc.) sets out with two plot strands. The first begins when something distracts Secret Service Agent Sean King and during that “split second,” presidential candidate Clyde Ritter is shot dead. King takes out the killer, but that’s not enough to save his reputation with the Secret Service. He retires and goes on to do often tedious but nonetheless always lucrative work (much like a legal thriller such as this) at a law practice. Plot two begins eight years later when another Secret Service Agent, Michelle Maxwell, lets presidential candidate John Bruno out of her sight for a few minutes at a wake for one of his close associates. He goes missing. Now Maxwell, too, gets in dutch with the SS. Though separated by time, the cases are similar and leave several questions unanswered. What distracted King at the rally? Bruno had claimed his friend’s widow called him to the funeral home. The widow (one of the few characters here to have any life) says she never called Bruno. Who set him up? Who did a chambermaid at Ritter’s hotel blackmail? And who is the man in the Buick shadowing King’s and Maxwell’s every move? King is a handsome, rich divorce, Maxwell an attractive marathon runner. Will they join forces and find each other kind of, well, appealing? But of course. The two former agents traverse the countryside, spinning endless hypotheses before the onset, at last, of a jerrybuilt conclusion that begs credibility and offers few surprises.
Assembly-line legal thriller: flat characters, lame scene-setting, and short but somehow interminable action: a lifeless concoction.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-53089-1
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
Categories: THRILLER
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