All action, all the time.
In his second in the series, Mann (SEAL Team Six: Hunt the Wolf, 2012) rips another Thomas Crocker kill-the-bad-guys action adventure straight from the headlines.
Chief Warrant Officer Tom Crocker is a multimission veteran in the war against terror. He has the battle discipline to stand down from a chance to kill a terrorist in Yemen when desk-jockeys send word down the satellite link. It seems Crocker’s assault team—Calvin, stoic sniper; Mancini, intellectual weapons specialist; Ritchie, explosives handler; Akil, Egyptian-American logistics expert; California-surfer-look-alike Davis, communications—is needed for a rapid response to an assault on the MSC Contessa, pirated off Somali. Helicopter insertion, Zodiac assault and dead pirates result. However, in the firefight, Crocker discovers the pirates are commanded by Iranian Revolutionary Corps Col. Farhed Alizadeh, and the hijack is an attempt to purloin yellow cake uranium, vital in nuclear weapon construction. The colonel’s trail leads to chaotic Libya, the oil-rich nation recovering from dictator Gadhafi’s overthrow. Mann, the SEAL veteran author, detours between pirate-killing and Libya to send Team Crocker to compete in a Moroccan ultraendurance marathon, mainly to stress SEAL physical fitness and list a litany of special ops outdoor products ranging from Adidas to Suunto watches. That expertise gibes with Mann's tactics and weapons know-how factoids sprinkled throughout the narrative, giving the story ring-true authority. Nevertheless, pace and intensity are cinematic, nonstop and superhuman compared to the reported real-life exploits of special operations troops. Sent undercover as an engineering team but assigned to find clues to the smuggling of nuclear material from anarchic Libya to terror-sponsoring Iran, Crocker and team deal with CIA obfuscation and NATO dithering. The mission goes to hell in a handbasket after Crocker learns that his wife, Holly, a State Department official, has been kidnapped by Gadhafi-loyalist Tuareg nomads apparently aligned with the nasty colonel. Add multiple shootouts, the notorious Pharm 150 site, secreted mustard blister agents and sarin nerve gases, ampules of uranium hexaflouride, the hijacking of an ancient 727-200, and there’s sufficient tension to keep the pages turning.
All action, all the time.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-20960-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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