Gardner's sixth James Bond novel forgoes the series' customary doomsday scenario and comic-strip villain, reviving 007's old nemesis SMERSH for unadorned spy vs. spy chills. But instead of producing a streamlined thriller, this stripping down only reveals the tiresome, rusted mechanics at the heart of Gardner's Bond incarnation. After a suspenseless prelude depicting Bond whisking away two lovelies from East Germany, Gardner jumps five years ahead to a meeting between Bond and M. There M—in Gardner's hands so thin a character as to deserve his non-name—details 007's new mission: to track down the Eastern bloc agents who have killed and mutilated two members of Cream Cake—a disbanded operation in which five teens born to deep-cover British agents seduced and spyed on top Communist operatives—and to protect the three Cream Cake members still alive, two of whom are the women Bond rescued five years before, the third of whom is male, whereabouts unknown. After obligatory/perfunctory interactions with Moneypenny, May, and the new female Q, Bond rounds up ex-Cream Caker Heather Dare (the usual juicy nubile) in London and flies with her to Dublin, where the two track down female Cream Caker #2. Oddly, Bond beds neither woman (is Gardner trying to signal that Bond, and the 007 series, has lost all virility?). Odder still, Bond positively blunders into capture by crack GRU agent Maj. Max Smolin. And oddest of all, as Bond surveys the living room of the mansion where Smolin takes him for questioning, Gardner unveils what must be one of the strangest character quirks in modern fiction: "Bond was always deeply suspicious of rugs." That senseless observation, symptomatic of a sleepwalking author, presages this novel's one surprise—Smolin turns out to be a British double agent—and a slew of predictable turns, winding up with Bond slaughtering a lot of SMERSHers in Hong Kong and winning the day through little wit or even brawn, but a hefty dose of plain dumb luck. Roger Moore has retired from his Bond involvement; it's time for Gardner, who's now just going through the motions, to do the same.
Pub Date: April 27, 1987
ISBN: 1605983837
Page Count: -
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987
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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