Fun if dizzying mashup of history and thrills.
In O’Connor’s (The Twilight of the Day, 2001, etc.) thriller, a retired FBI agent foils a Vatican takeover with roots in a WWII maneuver orchestrated by Ian Fleming and Winston Churchill.
Retired agent Justin Scott—introduced in The Seventh Seal (2005)—arrives at an airport in Rome during a strange terrorist shootout. One of these mysterious figures muses to herself: “Szuros, you always insisted Winston Churchill had done something long ago which would one day compel Moscow to declare war on the Holy See, yet we all chose to dismiss that warning. What happened here moments ago proves you were right all along, and now the world is about to reap a terrible whirlwind.” The novel then shifts to London in 1940. Lt. Cmdr. Ian Fleming suggests to Winston Churchill that they forge a letter from Sister Lucia, the Virgin of Fatima, who, in real life, claims to have had visions of the Virgin Mary as a child; her “letter” will be used to convince Hitler to invade Russia instead of England. Dr. Margaret Smalling is dispatched with newly invented penicillin to cure the ailing virgin and bring back handwriting samples. Cut back to Scott, a retired FBI agent who has done previous work for clergy. He’s being briefed by Cardinal Kettering, to whom Scott’s longtime friend Monsignor Jack O’Bryan reports, about some puzzling messages from Russia. Soon, various religious leaders are being killed or abducted, and the pope calls for an emergency meeting of cardinals in Rome. Scott is also made privy to the last letter of Fatima, which hints at the world’s end or at least the church’s toppling by Russian forces. As Scott tracks down various antagonists, a possible nuclear bomb threat hovers over the convening clergy. Author O’Connor, a retired USAF colonel, has written a nifty if overly ambitious thriller that brings up a surfeit of interesting threads—Dr. Smalling’s mission, the conspiratorial survival of the grand duchess of Russia, etc.—that don’t have ample time to fully develop. Still, O’Connor holds reader interest with his breakneck plot and some particularly charming characterizations, especially in the banter between Scott and O’Bryan. The end result fits nicely in the Tom Clancy–meets–Dan Brown canon.
Fun if dizzying mashup of history and thrills.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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