by Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2005
Genuine page-turner, expertly written, reminiscent at its best of James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor.
A taut, exciting and all-too-believable political thriller by Reagan administration defense secretary Weinberger and collaborator Schweizer (The Next War, 1996).
It’s a post-9/11 world, and Vice President Morgan Boyd is ticked off. His wife has been killed in Delhi, the victim of a bomb meant for him, and his superior, Dean Fairbank, has a soft spot for constitutional niceties that prevent an all-out war on terror. The solution? Well, it helps if the president is out of the way. Unfortunately for him, Secret Service agent Mike Delaney, who screwed up back in Delhi, is implicated; someone’s taken an awful lot of time and trouble to set him up, for reasons best known to him. Arrayed against Delaney are a whole lot of Delta Force types, to say nothing of a rogue team headed by a forcibly retired former Army colleague of Delaney’s and an extremely unpleasant Chilean black-ops specialist, neither of whom thinks twice about killing. Boyd’s plan is elegant: pin the assassination on the right-wing militia, the professional type not “composed of high school dropouts with beer guts who’ve been carrying a chip on their shoulder since they failed the Postal Service entrance exam,” crack down on domestic dissent, declare martial law and head to war with all guns blazing. Sadly for Boyd, though, Delaney is a resourceful fellow, backed by an initially doubtful ally and onetime lover named Mary Campos (“Just look at her, Mr. President. There may be a better-looking woman in the United States Army, but if there is, I haven’t met her”). Matters are complicated, too, by the fact that some officers still remember the business about unlawful orders and the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the government’s going to war against its own citizens, even in Alabama. Crisscrossing the Appalachians, a step ahead of some very bad guys, Delaney does his thing, leaving much to clean up in his wake.
Genuine page-turner, expertly written, reminiscent at its best of James Grady’s Six Days of the Condor.Pub Date: June 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-3773-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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BOOK REVIEW
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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239
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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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by Max Brooks
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Alex Michaelides ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 5, 2019
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
Awards & Accolades
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38
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
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
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