Don Camillo meets The Name of the Rose meets Dr. No: a rewarding beach book for grownups.
Grant, Cary Grant. Super secret agent. Not just in Hitchcock films, but in real life.
Four of the five members of the Bologna collective that produced “Luther Blissett’s” novel Q (2004) are back, now calling themselves Wu Ming, Chinese for “no name.” The subterfuge is appropriate, for this is a lively and thoroughly enjoyable thriller of shifting, unknown and mistaken identities, centered on a very Italian problem that attracted much world attention in 1954 but has since been forgotten: namely, the question of what to do with Yugoslav-partitioned Trieste, a little city-state caught in the Cold War power struggle between East and West. How to return Trieste to the Italian—and thus Western—fold? Well, reason the cold warriors of MI6, the first thing is to make Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito feel more welcome among the capitalists than the Russians, and the way to do that is to “change the attitude of Western public opinion about Tito’s Yugoslavia.” Enter Cary Grant, né the resolutely proletarian Archie Leach, a leftist who sees in the eyes of moviegoers the dream of his own “escape from a life of shit and work” and who, it’s revealed, spent some time during WWII keeping an eye out on Hollywood’s Nazi sympathizers, among them Errol Flynn and Walt Disney. With a few failed films behind him and the age of 50 creeping up, Cary is willing enough to pitch in, though on his own terms. When he reads the debut novel of a newly published spook named Ian Fleming, he takes on the character of James Bond, and then things get cracking. Bullets fly, knives are inserted into backs, intrigues unfold, consciousness is raised under a “lysergic sun” and a dazzling array of major and minor players—the Emperor Bao Dai, Marilyn Monroe, Lucky Luciano, Hitchcock, David Niven, Tito—passes by.
Don Camillo meets The Name of the Rose meets Dr. No: a rewarding beach book for grownups.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101380-2
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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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