A skillful blend of political savvy, international espionage, and high drama.
A covert operation of American and Japanese forces plans to extract an engineer with valuable intelligence from North Korea in this novel.
Discovering a boat smuggling drugs off the coast of the Noto Peninsula, the Japanese Coast Guard pursues the vessel. The craft discharges sophisticated anti-ship missiles, inadvertently killing a fisherman and his young daughter. Wilson Bennett, an analyst for the U.S. National Security Council, believes there’s a possibility that the missiles are traceable to North Korea, an indication that the country has made considerable technological progress. In addition, the exportation of that technology into Japan, used in an attack on that nation’s military personnel, would constitute an act of war. Meanwhile, Bennett learns from a humanitarian group operating an underground transport of illicit supplies—including Bibles—into North Korea that an engineer, Pyong Hae Han, with access to highly classified information about the government’s progress developing a nuclear missile, is looking to defect. But that kind of exfiltration is highly problematic: First, an engineer working on such a secretive project would never be allowed to leave the country, which means his rescuers will have to cross the North Korean border. In addition, he won’t depart without his family, which includes a child stricken with muscular dystrophy. To further complicate matters, Bennett confesses that none of the engineer’s story—including his identity—is confirmable. Bennett teams up with Trinh Archer—a U.S. diplomat with an expertise in organized crime and drug smuggling—to plan the joint operation of American and Japanese troops. Archer’s life is endangered when the crime boss overseeing the smuggling operation—Takada Kano—decides the diplomat’s investigation threatens his business. Radcliffe (Goraiko: Japan’s National Security in an Era of Asymmetric Threats, 2014, etc.) is astonishingly knowledgeable about a matrix of subjects around which the novel revolves: Asian regional affairs, Japanese politics and culture, military technology, and the murky world of global spying. This is a stunningly well-researched tale. And while the story is both dense and complex, the author’s prose is mercifully transparent, and the plot is structured in a way that maximizes clarity. In addition, the drama is simply gripping, and Radcliffe provides a fascinating portal into the most reclusive regime in the world, and the macabre deprivations of even its more privileged citizens. And as engrossing and action-packed as the story is, the author never skimps on the meaningful construction of his characters. Bennett emerges as a multifaceted protagonist, a hardened analyst who has seen the ugly depths of human depravity but still retains his idealistic commitments, presumably the vestigial influence of his parents, who worked as missionaries in Asia. Radcliffe occasionally succumbs to the charms of narrative formulas—Archer establishes her toughness by physically punishing a coarse American soldier. When she verbally threatens his friends, one responds: “Holy shit lady, you’re damn right we won’t touch you!” The depiction of the Japanese criminal underworld is susceptible to similar tropes, with shopworn fictional devices ostensibly used to assist the lazier reader. Nonetheless, this book is an immersive and educational experience.
A skillful blend of political savvy, international espionage, and high drama.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-983491-23-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 1, 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
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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