Lustbader at the top of his powers, a poetic karate chopper with a smashing autumnal finish, by the author of The Ninja, French Kiss, etc. This time out, Lustbader dims the gratuitous gore (still plenty but not so much), cuts back on outlandish action, and reigns in his subplots with a firmer hand. Grieving Tori Nunn—a Wild Child picked off the Tokyo streets by Bernard Godwin, head of a supersecret US intelligence agency called the Mall, and turned into its top agent because of her closeness to the Yakusa criminal gangs of Japan—resigns from the agency when her brother Greg dies in outer space on a joint Russian/American space shot. Actually, however, Greg lived and his fellow Russian cosmonaut died. But Greg had contact with something extraterrestrial and has been turned into a peace-loving semidolphin with superpowers who has to be kept in a big salt-water pool in a Russian prison. With his big dolphin eyes ("angel eyes"), mind-reader Greg secretly runs an underground group called White Star, which is out to save Gorby from assassination. Meanwhile, Tori is seduced back into the Mall and given top director Russell Slade as her field assistant. Her job: to break the Medellin cartel, which now markets a supercocaine that kills its users in three months or less. The Yakusa are in on this too, and so Toff and Slade first find themselves in Medellin ("Machine-Gun City"), digging their way into the drug-lords' compound, then off to Tokyo and facing out the Yakusa traffickers, and finally to Moscow, where Godwin is fitting out the underground movement with nuclear devices. In the subplot, Toffs zillionaire parents—aging Hollywood star Laura Nunn and her husband Ellis Nunn, Hollywood's greatest lighting genius—are funding Greg's White Star movement and supplying armaments. The climax, suspended over the whole tale, is ToWs meeting with dolphin brother Greg (called "The Hero" by his Russian captors) in his pool. Stupendous trash from a master hand.
Pub Date: May 28, 1994
ISBN: 0345466829
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
