A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.
In Williams’ debut thriller, a man plots to evade taxes by cheating a casino—a scheme that goes horribly wrong when someone ends up dead.
Millionaire businessman Burt Donaldson doesn’t like that the U.S. government takes nearly 40 percent of his yearly earnings, so he hatches a plot to trim the taxes he owes. He plans to fix a game of roulette at his Vegas casino: he’ll let a gambler win millions but afterward have the bulk of the winnings returned to himself. A few of Burt’s execs pick Aussie employee Jason Chard to play the lucky winner, as his memorization is solid—Burt makes sure to test his skills—and he and wife Debbie could duck away to their home country with their portion of the cash; Burt would then pick up his portion from Jason. The ruse works, but it seems that, weeks later in Australia, Jason is reluctant to part with any of the score. Burt travels to Australia to track down Jason but gets more than he bargained for—a murder rap to beat. Williams’ novel often reads like a soap opera, a thoroughly enjoyable one, with murder, mystery, sexual tension, and a double cross or two. Burt opens the story as the protagonist, but there’s also sufficient coverage of Jason while the roulette scheme is underway and of John Fix, vice president of administration, whose romance with assistant lawyer Jane Coe is tested when an envious John questions her frequent business meetings with Burt. For details, Williams is meticulous, which typically works in the novel’s favor, especially with regard to the laborious process of choosing the gambler: John, marketing VP Peter Rush, and attorney Bill Smythe take their time for the selection, which helps build suspense and exposes each man’s doubts about their boss’s plans. All of these plot points likewise lead to a big payoff at the end, and the novel caps off with a nice, effective twist. The excessive particulars, however, can sometimes be a bit much. For example, as Burt explains the scam to Jason at dinner, Jason eyes his meal and allows the narrative to turn into a superfluous lesson on how to eat French onion soup. Eventually, though, once Burt reaches Australia, the plot becomes wittily convoluted in a mystery that zigzags with glee.
A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491749081
Page Count: 272
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 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
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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