Well-written and dense with complicity, this is an action-packed glimpse of intrusive technology in which the good guys...
A timely thriller that brings drone warfare to the streets of America. There is treachery here—in the government, in big business and among the technology geeks who make it all work.
Darwin Cole is a hotshot F-16 pilot pulled back from the skies to man a drone; he flies from a screen in Nevada and watches in horror as a young girl in Afghanistan dies on camera. He flips out, loses his family and sinks into a dissolute life drinking in a trailer in the desert. Something doesn't add up for him. The wrong targets are being killed, and the military and civilian contractors involved are not being held accountable. Darwin’s road back to sanity begins when Keira Lyttle, a reporter following the threads of a labyrinthine story about the Predator program, appears at Darwin’s trailer and lures him into the hunt for the truth. Keira and her fellow journalists Steve Merritt and Barb Holtzman are tracing clues that military targets in Afghanistan and Iraq are “glorified test labs, proving grounds…for state-of-the-art technology.” What is learned in the air above the war zones is refined back in the U.S. and tested by surveillance on the streets of America. Darwin and his crew of reporters are tracked and even photographed inside their safe house remotely. Their clues lead to a security company called IntelPro, near Chesapeake Bay. Enter Nelson Hayley Sharpe, a technology guru who worked for the Pentagon. Sharpe is Fesperman’s signature character, a mad, colorful genius who pulls all the dangling threads together for Darwin. Having been pushed aside by the military, Sharpe is out for himself with more than a hint of revenge. Fesperman has delivered an unlikely thriller nuanced with moral ambiguity. As Sharpe says: “Legality is no longer the point.”
Well-written and dense with complicity, this is an action-packed glimpse of intrusive technology in which the good guys never have clear moral standing.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35125-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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
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
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