by Dean Koontz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 25, 2022
Don’t lose sleep over the answers. Just sit back and enjoy what turns out to be quite a ride.
A foundling boy and his tiny circle of friends must save the world from creatures even less human than they are.
Ever since he was abandoned on an Arizona highway three days after his birth, Quinn Quicksilver has lived something of a marginal life. Discovered by lineman Hakeem Kaspar and two buddies and brought to the Mater Misericordiæ orphanage, he was passed over repeatedly for adoption and remained with the nuns, who raised him until he landed a job for Arizona!magazine writing about people too dead to lodge complaints. This very limited stability comes crashing down hours after a strange, unrecognizable magnetism leads him to a valuable gold coin in an abandoned restaurant. As he’s sitting in a diner afterward, he’s suddenly flanked by two members of the Internal Security Agency who quietly demand that he come along without making a fuss. Escaping in the fuss that instantly ensues, Quinn takes it on the lam until that magnetic force brings him up against contractor Sparky Rainking, who moonlights as novelist Daphne Larkrise, and his granddaughter, Bridget. The Rainkings, who have their own history with the ISA, do their best to bring Quinn up to speed, but Bridget’s bombshell announcement that “several sequences in my genome are not human,” though it offers a theory as to why the same people who’ve targeted her and Sparky are now setting their sights on Quinn, raises a lot more questions than it answers. What sort of beings are the Rainkings? Is Quinn not fully human? And what sort of relationships can he expect to form with the other sort-of-humans who seem increasingly to be littering the Arizona landscape?
Don’t lose sleep over the answers. Just sit back and enjoy what turns out to be quite a ride.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1988-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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by Dean Koontz
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by Dean Koontz
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by Dean Koontz
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2024
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
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16
Our Verdict
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New York Times Bestseller
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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