Engaging heartstuff about lovers divided by religious loyalties, while Land’s mock-serious pulp fiction plot moves...
Seventh in Land’s swiftly paced prisoners-of-a-world-in-conflict saga.
Center stage again are Palestinian-American Police Inspector Ben Kamal and his beloved, ex-Israeli Chief Inspector Danielle Barnea, who is now a fugitive from Israel and works with Ben for the United Nations Safety and Security Service. In The Blue Widows (2003), the couple faced down terrorists who hoped to fulfill a prophecy about the Black Death by means of a plot enjoined by terrorists and drug companies to kill half of the US population. Switch now to the prophecies of Nostradamus and the present-day massacre of a Palestinian village. First, though, back in 1945, a team of American soldiers liberating Buchenwald find under a pit of corpses four large sealed steel containers—a McGuffin not so distant from the one in The Maltese Falcon. As with the Falcon, we don’t find out what’s in the containers until near novel’s end, but everyone tied to these containers winds up dead. Ben and Danielle are working against plots in different parts of the world that happen later to join in with the Nostradamus plot—itself an End of All Things prophecy bent on the destruction of all US states. While Ben chases down an Iraqi villain in the new Baghdad, the UN sends Danielle back to Israel on a UN visa, where she’s still wanted but is allowed in because the Israelis hate the hypocritical UN as strongly as they do the Palestinians (and as Danielle did when she worked for Israeli Security). Her presence now will allow Israel the power to deny everything in the event it doesn’t hear what it wants about the Palestinian massacre she’s investigating. While Ben and Danielle draw ever closer together, both meet surprise bursts of flying bullets in every fourth or fifth chapter.
Engaging heartstuff about lovers divided by religious loyalties, while Land’s mock-serious pulp fiction plot moves hell-bent—just as fans want and as Land loves to deliver.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-765-30969-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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