Satiric mystery adventure about a crazed Miami reporter and an eruption of bloodlust meant to drive off the tourists and developers. It's December and the loyal Shriners have arrived in southern Florida for their annual Miami Beach bash. Theodore Bellamy goes out for a swim with his wife Nell, gets stung by a man-of-war and after two fake "lifeguards" take him off to a hospital, disappears. What happens to B.D. "Sparky" Harper, President of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, is much worse: with a toy rubber alligator stuffed down his throat, his 190 pounds (smeared with suntan oil) are chewed off at the knees and stuffed into a piece of Samsonite luggage, head and all—wearing black wraparound sunglasses. And that's just the start of varied bombings, an aerial assault (dropping rattlesnakes) on a cruise ship, and other horrors perpetrated by the so-called "El Fuego, Comandante, Las Noches de Diciembre" (The Fire, the Nights of December). Brian Keyes, private investigator, is hired to help defend Ernesto Cabal, small-time burglar accused of murdering Harper for his car. Brian's investigation eventually circles back to the Miami Sun—where there are many, many nuts, chief of whom is Skip Wiley, a once-celebrated columnist whose lunatic writings are so bizarre that his own editor has put Wiley and his columns under psychiatric examination. Chief terrorist Wiley at last kidnaps the Orange Bowl Queen and stakes her onto a coral isle that is about to be dynamited for later bulldozing by land developers. What Wiley hates is "an entire generation of blow-dried rapists with phones in their Volvos and five-million-dollar lines of credit and secretaries who give head"—i.e., greedy, blind land-developers. Hiaasen gives an up-to-date sharpness to the old Hecht-MacArthur Front Page cynicism as he slices up limbs for his boiling pot-of-horrors. With this kind of thick-skinned black humor, real feelings would be intrusive—even about ecology and the rape of Florida. Everything is sacrificed to a news-hound humor that is as forced as it is cynical. But if you like your gallows laughs with gall, this could be for you.
Pub Date: March 24, 1986
ISBN: 0446695718
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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