A brashly retro escapist caper reminiscent of Topkapi and just as likely to be filmed.
The creator of Dexter Morgan, everyone’s favorite homicidal sociopath (Dexter Is Dead, 2015, etc.), dials down the mayhem just enough to introduce a master thief who’s equally proficient at his trade.
Riley Wolfe is bored. Every single one of his heists, even the theft of a 12.5-ton sculpture from Chicago’s Nesselrode Plaza during its dedication ceremony, goes off so seamlessly that there are no new mountains left to scale—almost literally, since Riley is accomplished in parkour as well as larceny. Looking for a suitably impossible challenge, he decides to steal the Daryayeh-E-Noor (Ocean of Light) diamond from among the Iranian crown jewels. The Islamic Republic obligingly makes the job easier by sending the jewels from their impregnable stronghold in Tehran to New York’s Eberhardt Museum, a display site that promises to be exceptionally well armored but not quite as unbreachable. Riley’s plot, as preposterous as it is absorbing, involves multiple disguises, multiple forged artworks supplied by his friend and one-time lover, Monique, and, for better or worse, multiple murders he carries out in between dispensing matter-of-fact bromides like “it doesn’t pay to have friends, because you have to trust them, and that never works out.” But you can’t make headlines without breaking some necks, and Riley, though he takes no particular pleasure in dispatching the unsuspecting souls who stand between him and the Daryayeh-E-Noor, is fully up to the task. About the only thing that casts doubt on the ultimate success of his plan, which pleasingly unfolds with nary a hint of foreshadowing about ways and means, is his devotion to his long-comatose mother, an attachment Chicago FBI agent Frank Delgado, as fanatic as Riley in his way, picks up on after an inexplicable brain wave tells him that Riley’s targeted the diamond, setting in motion a familiar game of cat and mouse, or cat and other cat.
A brashly retro escapist caper reminiscent of Topkapi and just as likely to be filmed.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4394-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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