Gottlieb is never dull, which is a bigger compliment than it sounds, so we keep turning the pages, albeit with a raised...
In his jaunty, intermittently suspenseful third novel, Gottlieb (Now You See Him, 2008, etc.) tracks a femme fatale/con artist and her victims.
Margot Lassiter was only 16 when she began learning how to control men through sex. Ice cold, she felt nothing for her many conquests. An unhappy childhood behind her, she learned how to read people during a stint at a New York fashion magazine. The plot kicks in when she asks Lawrence Billings for private lessons. Middle-aged and happily married, Lawrence is an expert on face and body language; his seminars are Dale Carnegie spinoffs. Margot has moved on to an investment firm and needs to perfect her game. She already has a target in her sights: John Potash, once a New York educator trapped in a boring marriage, now a transplant in Northern California, madly in love with his second wife and possessor of a sizable nest egg. Gottlieb juggles the stories of Margot, Lawrence and John. Margot’s story is partially flashbacks, for a mysterious fall down a staircase has resulted in memory loss and broken bones. It feels awkward, and somewhat diminishes the drama of her entrapment of John and Lawrence. She quickly separates John from his nest egg; evidently sunny California has turned his brains to mush. Nor is Lawrence, who should know better, immune to Margot’s charms; she almost wrecks his marriage. But when a hard-boiled detective on surveillance duty also falls for her, that strains reader credulity; he’s one sap too many. There are other problems: Margot’s accomplices in the financial scam, who appear and disappear without explanation, and a cavalier response to an attempted murder. Though these moves are fumbled, Gottlieb is very good with the incidentals, especially John’s relationship with his canny old mother.
Gottlieb is never dull, which is a bigger compliment than it sounds, so we keep turning the pages, albeit with a raised eyebrow.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173505-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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