Unrushed but thoroughly fascinating look into the making and pursuit of the most frightening kind of terrorist, one of our...
Once again applying the best techniques of the classic Cold War thriller to the god-awful morass we’re now bogged down in, Seymour (A Line in the Sand, 2000, etc.) follows a hate-seeking human projectile into the heart of the Arabian Desert on his way to a reunion with al Qaeda.
Young, intelligent and motivated by a loathing for the West as strong as any native jihadist, the operative known as Abu Khaleb was once a Brit named Caleb. Swept up in an ambush in Afghanistan, Caleb had the presence of mind to latch onto the identity of a cab driver killed in the same raid, an identity he maintained through two years in the Guantanamo prison camp. His apparent innocence and cultural simplicity made him suitable for one of the periodic releases from the camp, an opportunity that gets him out just before repatriation. Seymour follows the efforts of American and British human and electronic intelligence gatherers as they begin to understand that the supposedly simple taxi driver is so important to the hunkered-down al Qaeda leadership that they’ll go to any lengths to bring him to their cave in the center of the Saudi wasteland in order to equip him with the filthiest of radioactive weapons. Third-generation British spy Eddie Wroughton works his Riyadh network of informers, including washed-up physician Samuel “Bart” Bartholomew, for scraps of information about Saudi plans and treachery; American Defense Intelligence officer Jed Dietrich, Caleb’s Guantanamo inquisitor, sifts through his own records; and American techies Lizzy Jo and Marty manipulate their pair of armed drone aircraft over endless miles of desert in search of Caleb’s caravan. Professional and national jealousies complicate the work, as does the encounter between the terrorists on their camels and a comely scientist in her Land Rover.
Unrushed but thoroughly fascinating look into the making and pursuit of the most frightening kind of terrorist, one of our own.Pub Date: March 18, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-634-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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