A highly recommended read that will make readers hope for a sequel.
A thriller that moves between Los Angeles luxury and war in the Middle East.
Williams’ (Waking Lazarus, 2016, etc.) novel opens with a rush as antiques auction-house owner and former presidential candidate Michael Hardeman frantically, and ultimately unsuccessfully, struggles to stop his Gulfstream jet from crashing into the Mojave Desert. Simultaneously, federal agents raid Hollywood, California–based Hardeman Auctions, seizing boxes of documents that might reveal a money-laundering scheme as well as other illegalities. Now that 24-year-old Chase Hardeman’s father is dead, he must deal with this investigation into the family business—an operation that pulls in hundreds of millions annually from a wealthy, A-list clientele. Helping Chase to get through these dark days are tech genius and billionaire Randall Collinsworth, whom he calls “Uncle Randy” although they’re not related; Chase’s girlfriend, Laney, who has “gunmetal blue eyes”;his best friend and fellow former soldier, Dax; and his ex-lover Elena Vihkrov, a Russian beauty. Both the crash and the raid have ties to Chase and Dax’s past activities in Mosul, where they purchased stolen antiquities from terrorist leader Abu Haji Fatima—“spoils of war” that eventually ended up at Hardeman Auctions. However, betrayal soon erodes Chase’s support system, and his life becomes as turbulent as his father’s doomed flight. Fatima’s right-hand man, Akram Kasim, and his crew pursue Chase in a nightclub, and although he escapes the venue, a bloodbath soon ensues. Williams delivers an exciting, well-executed thriller. The major characters occupy a grey area between good and bad; even Chase admits that he and his dad were mixed up with the wrong people: “I was no Boy Scout. Sins of a father and son—committed far more often than we ever admitted,” he reveals. The danger is palpable, and women get meaty roles as agents, terrorists, lovers, and combinations of the three. Conversations seem realistic, such as when Elena softly begs Chase to stay the night; after he says that he can’t, Elena smiles coyly and says, “She must be special.” If only Dax would call Chase “bro” slightly less often, the book would be near-perfect.
A highly recommended read that will make readers hope for a sequel.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Forgotten Stories, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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