A good choice for thriller fans.
A fast-moving novel featuring the return of hit-man hitter and antihero Michael Hendricks (The Killing Kind, 2015).
Tourist Jake Reston takes a video of his family with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Suddenly, a tugboat crashes into the bridge and explodes, causing massive damage and an unknown number of casualties. CNN obtains Reston’s video of the disaster and televises it repeatedly. A bystander happens to appear briefly in the video. It’s Frank Segreti, thought to be long dead by the Council, an umbrella alliance of organized crime groups. An incredulous Council member says, “This doesn’t make any sense. We blew Segreti’s ass up seven years ago,” so “how’d he just end up on my TV?” Meanwhile, Hendricks wants to take down the Council, the Council wants to find Segreti and kill him again, and Segreti wants to get far away from the scene of the blast, for which the unknown “True Islamic Caliphate” immediately takes responsibility. FBI Special Agent Charlie Thompson wants to protect Segreti, a federal witness, but is ordered to focus on the investigation of the bridge blast. A woman named Cameron wants to help Hendricks “stop bad guys” because he’d previously killed the man who’d been hired to off Cameron’s mother. A Council bad guy named Chet Yancey interrogates Reston about the man in the video. Meanwhile, there's Sal Lombino, who is “solely responsible for executing Council orders” and is known as the “Devil’s Red Right Hand.” Unfortunately, bad person though Lombino is, he doesn’t seem to earn his terrifying nickname. It’s a complicated story with a few twists—nothing stunning but entertaining enough. Readers will root for Hendricks, even though he’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, because he has a more solid moral code than your average murderer.
A good choice for thriller fans.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-25956-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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