Not your father’s anti-terrorism yarn. Leonard’s characters make James Bond look fidgety.
Leonard’s company of stock character types—the veteran law enforcer, the savvy professional woman, the seen-it-all sidekick, the horny billionaire—are so cool that they can confront international terrorism without batting an eyelash.
Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Dara Barr wants to make a new film about Somali pirates. Along with her grizzled factotum Xavier LeBo, she rents a boat and cruises the Horn of Africa looking for seafarers on every side of the law. While she’s chatting them up and filming them, the Gold Dust Twins—Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, aka Harry, and American-educated pirate Idris Mohammed—are scouring the area for terrorists, and billionaire Billy Wynn is in the neighborhood test-driving his latest girlfriend to see if Helene is up to the rigors of a topless sea voyage. The cast spends quite a while checking each other out—an extended period that will delight fans of Leonard (Road Dogs, 2009, etc.) and drive everyone else crazy—because they don’t know that the catalyst of all the action has yet to make an appearance. He’s Jama Raisuli, an American Muslim who together with noted al-Qaeda operative Qasim al Salah is removed from the tanker Aphrodite just after they succeeded in hiding enough phone-activated explosives aboard to blow the ship and its load of natural gas to kingdom come. When Jama escapes from his laughably incompetent Somali jailers, the countdown to Armageddon begins. Jama is determined to wreak enough havoc to make the strategic port of Djibouti a distant memory; Billy, convinced that the Aphrodite is doomed, is bent on destroying it himself well out of the port’s range; Dara, realizing that Jama is executing everyone who knows that he was born James Russell, keeps filming while she awaits his inevitable approach; and Helene continues to suck up the salt air so that Billy won’t have any excuse to put her ashore and move on to the next lovely spousal candidate.
Not your father’s anti-terrorism yarn. Leonard’s characters make James Bond look fidgety.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173517-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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