Although much of this is cartoonishly over-the-top, there is surely an enthusiastic audience for it.
In Franz’s thriller, one CIA agent strives to save the world from the mother of all viruses.
CIA agent Jeremy Kent was a mole in a bad guys’ outfit and was discovered, but only after he had snatched and hidden the antidote to the most insidious and powerful artificial virus known to humankind. Of course, he does not crack under torture, and in the nick of time, escapes. (In fact, he escapes time and time again!) Jeremy is being chased now all across Europe, and in a particularly harrowing getaway, beautiful innocent bystander Allison Shaw is pulled into the chaos. Now it is the two of them on the run—and of course the seeds of love have been planted. They have the antidote to the virus but must retrieve a key (don’t ask) that has been stashed in Buckingham Palace. Franz certainly knows how to keep things moving. The chapters are very short, and unlike thrillers with more subtle plots, this one is really just one long, relentless, hair-raising chase. The good guys are good, and the bad guys are horrifically, pathologically bad. Jeremy is not George Smiley but rather James Bond, squared. At one point, he chews into his own shoulder to get out a capsule that will simulate death. He is shot, knifed, and thrown around like a rag doll, but he always recovers with, seemingly, no lasting effects. There are some good if overwrought lines (“A cloud of nightmarish déjà vu instantly filled the cabin”), and the writing is generally up to the job despite occasional typos. At the climax, all seems lost, but we have learned by now to trust in the hokey faith that Franz has instilled in us.
Although much of this is cartoonishly over-the-top, there is surely an enthusiastic audience for it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-09-837913-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Plenty of intrigue and action for crime fans.
A paper mill in Georgia uses murder to buoy its bottom line.
Killers hunt down and kill a retiree while he’s peacefully fishing. No one suspects foul play, as the poor man apparently hit his head on a low branch and drowned. Attorney Brent Walker is hired to be assistant general counsel for the Southern Republic Pulp and Paper Company, where his longtime friend Hank Reed is a union official. They are not privy to the company’s biggest secret, and this story is about what they learn and what they do about it. A small cabal at the top of the company has a creative approach to cost-saving: They’ve created something called the Priority program, which identifies and eliminates expensive employees and retirees. Critically for the plot, the company is self-insured. So how can it stay profitable if it must pay out big claims for, say, cancer or Alzheimer’s patients? Maybe an employee stays healthy but has a child with a lifelong debilitating illness. The solution for this company lies in the untimely deaths of these troublesome claimants. “Terminal care was particularly expensive. An almost bottomless pit.” Top management has a long-standing arrangement with a group of professionals who expertly make deaths look natural. There is a mysterious list of nine-digit numbers, unaccompanied by any explanation. The obvious guess is that they are Social Security numbers, which may or may not be what they are. Walker and Reed intend to learn their significance, and their sleuthing could end up with—well, people dying. In fact, the killings become much less subtle as the action reaches a crescendo. Meanwhile, the bad guys are acutely aware of their culpability—if anyone finds a certain set of secret folders, there may be “enough evidence to indict us all for mass murder.” One of their hired killers is dying from cancer and wishes to partially repent, though he knows “his soul was beyond saving, his eternal fate sealed.” But maybe he can keep Priorities off future lists. The author is an attorney familiar with Georgia’s paper industry, so he’s clearly well suited to the topic, and readers will recognize the similarities to John Grisham.
Plenty of intrigue and action for crime fans.Pub Date: July 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770870
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.
Another Brown (Inferno, 2013, etc.) blockbuster, blending arcana, religion, and skulduggery—sound familiar?—with the latest headlines.
You just have to know that when the first character you meet in a Brown novel is a debonair tech mogul and the second a bony-fingered old bishop, you’ll end up with a clash of ideologies and worldviews. So it is. Edmond Kirsch, once a student of longtime Brown hero Robert Langdon, the Harvard symbologist–turned–action hero, has assembled a massive crowd, virtual and real, in Bilbao to announce he’s discovered something that’s destined to kill off religion and replace it with science. It would be ungallant to reveal just what the discovery is, but suffice it to say that the religious leaders of the world are in a tizzy about it, whereupon one shadowy Knights of Malta type takes it upon himself to put a bloody end to Kirsch’s nascent heresy. Ah, but what if Kirsch had concocted an AI agent so powerful that his own death was just an inconvenience? What if it was time for not just schism, but singularity? Digging into the mystery, Langdon finds a couple of new pals, one of them that computer avatar, and a whole pack of new enemies, who, not content just to keep Kirsch’s discovery under wraps, also frown on the thought that a great many people in the modern world, including some extremely prominent Spaniards, find fascism and Falangism passé and think the reigning liberal pope is a pretty good guy. Yes, Franco is still dead, as are Christopher Hitchens, Julian Jaynes, Jacques Derrida, William Blake, and other cultural figures Brown enlists along the way—and that’s just the beginning of the body count. The old ham-fisted Brown is here in full glory (“In that instant, Langdon realized that perhaps there was a macabre silver lining to Edmond’s horrific murder”; “The vivacious, strong-minded beauty had turned Julián’s world upside down”)—but, for all his defects as a stylist, it can’t be denied that he knows how to spin a yarn, and most satisfyingly.
The plot is absurd, of course, but the book is a definitive pleasure. Prepare to be absorbed—and in more ways than one.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-51423-1
Page Count: 461
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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