A diverting tale of an exciting, harrowing quest for a centuries-old fortune.
In Leng’s thriller, the search for long-hidden gold puts treasure hunters in unexpected peril.
Jack Sullivan makes money leading private tours in Pennsylvania. If he could, he would devote all his time to his obsession: searching for Major General Edward Braddock’s legendary buried gold. (During the 18th-century French and Indian War, the British officer ordered Captain Thomas Clarke to stash the army’s payroll.) In the present day, a construction crew in Maryland unearths a wooden barrel containing, among other things, Clarke’s journal. Thanks to Jack’s connection to Emma Wilson (she’s his ex-fiancee), the assistant director and curator at the Museum of American History, he gets first crack at the document. Clarke left at least one coded message that points Jack to a marker, one of several that may ultimately lead to Braddock’s treasure. Of course, Jack can’t do this alone, and his best friend Steve Johnson (who saved his life when the two were in the Navy) joins him on the mission. Surprisingly, Emma lends a hand as well, despite Jack’s obsessive hunt for the gold being the reason she broke off their engagement. They debate how much to tell others—even potential allies, like the descendant of a French officer tied to Clarke and the director of a local Maryland museum. Jack and his friends aren’t the only ones looking; they repeatedly spot a hooded individual and the same pickup truck in their vicinity. Things quickly escalate as a break-in, an act of vandalism, and an assault make abundantly clear the lengths to which their unknown rivals are willing to go.
Leng layers his first foray into fiction with generous amounts of American history. The plot intermittently bounces between different times, portraying events from the Battle of Fort Duquesne to Clarke and fellow soldiers braving such hazardous terrain as a raging river to hide the payroll and markers. While Braddock appears in some scenes, the true focus is on Clarke, who showcases cleverness and tenacity as both a leader and an officer following orders. The present-day cast hews to a steady routine of painstaking searches and lighthearted downtime. The latter allows for Steve to find romance as well as the possibility of Jack and Emma reigniting their old flame (“Although she believed they were friends now, some uncertainty was in her mind. They moved to the beat of the music, and she lost herself in the moment. He whispered, ‘You’re still the best dance partner I’ve had’”). Some of the humor falls flat (usually when someone trying to lighten the mood), but the quips and banter between the friends conveys a welcome kinship. Readers expecting the treasure hunters to crack increasingly baffling codes may be disappointed, as the bulk of the story consists of them moving from place to place looking for markers. Nevertheless, the tension weighs heavily in a search that involves scuba diving to underwater caverns and squeezing into cramped spaces. The final act further amplifies the danger and throws in a few surprises as the novel winds down.
A diverting tale of an exciting, harrowing quest for a centuries-old fortune.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9798335212397
Page Count: 424
Publisher: White Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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