A flawed novel which could, with the right cast to lend emotional depth, make very good TV.
A Jewish nuclear physicist is accused of spying while working on the nuclear bomb in Los Alamos.
During the waning months of World War II, the Americans and Germans are in a race to develop nuclear weapons; whoever wins, wins the world. Many refugee European scientists are working for the U.S. nuclear effort, headed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Among these refugees is Dr. Hannah Weiss, loosely based on Dr. Lise Meitner, the unsung physicist who discovered nuclear fission. Maj. Jack Delaney has come to Los Alamos to interrogate Hannah, suspected of being a Nazi mole. His suspicions are founded on a telegram she may have attempted to send overseas and a packet of postcards gleaned from a search of her room. Flashbacks to 1938 Berlin are interspersed throughout. Hannah, a brilliant scientist, is relegated to a basement lab of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and treated as a “Jewish slave.” Her work on atom splitting is so valuable to the Reich, however, that what remains of her family—her Uncle Joshua and niece Sabine—have so far escaped the worst impacts of Nazi persecution. Her colleague Stefan, whose playboy charm Hannah tries to resist, takes credit for her work. But Stefan will eventually help Sabine, and then Hannah, escape Germany, and love overcomes her distrust. But should it? Screenwriter and TV director Eliasberg’s first novel effectively evokes the atmosphere; descriptions of setting are never merely ornamental. However, her characters lack interiority. Jack never quite transcends the stereotype of the hard-boiled detective with inner wounds to match his external ones: A bullet he took during the liberation of Paris is still lodged near his spine. Hannah is the beautiful ice queen who conceals a molten core of passion. Far from delivering the intended frisson of growing attraction, Jack and Hannah’s verbal sparring is too often verbose and didactic. The characters are so one-dimensional that readers won’t particularly care which side they’re on.
A flawed novel which could, with the right cast to lend emotional depth, make very good TV.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53744-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Back Bay/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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