A taut suspense tale energized by a unique premise, dastardly criminals, and a resilient hero.
In Howard’s (It’s About Time, 2016, etc.) thriller, a longtime police investigator fights criminals by using hopeless cancer patients as suicide bombers.
In this book’s riveting opening chapter, a dying man fakes his way into a cocktail party for a recently exonerated criminal. He then ignites a vest full of explosives and blows himself and the entire hotel floor to smithereens. It turns out that August Bock, the CEO of freight company Worldwide Dispatch, is using desperate, penniless, terminally ill people to wreak revenge. After his company zeros in on an unjustly absolved lawbreaker, it strikes a deal with a dying patient, who must carry out a suicide-bombing mission in return for a $4 million payout. Hopeless and eager to leave a windfall for their families, the bombers are willing pawns in a “righteous war” of vigilante justice. Meanwhile, a tough, veteran Miami police detective and single father, Gabe Mitchell, and his feisty partner, Joanne Hansen, are busy fighting crime on their own turf, although Gabe’s health has seen much better days. When he’s diagnosed with a metastatic brain tumor, he falls into Bock’s cross hairs. The CEO swiftly offers him the aforementioned deadly deal. When Gabe refuses, Bock tries to blackmail him into it, which eventually leads to a breathless standoff on a yacht. The intriguing plotline elevates Howard’s sophomore crime thriller above genre expectations. The author’s talent for suspense and narrative momentum is on full display here. He recounts Gabe’s emotional journey as he comes to terms with his terminal diagnosis and his guilt over his surviving son’s welfare, and he cleverly follows it with the cop’s later crisis of conscience. The clock ticks down to Gabe’s forced act of vengeance—and the end of his life—while a few unexpected twists and turns make things even more interesting. There’s also an underlying theme of morality permeating the story; long after Howard’s exhilarating, skyscraper-set conclusion plays out, the question of the ethics of contracted retribution will linger in the readers’ minds. At more than 450 pages in length, Howard’s book could have used some pruning, but overall, this is an ambitious adventure—one that may seem preposterous to some and completely credible to others.
A taut suspense tale energized by a unique premise, dastardly criminals, and a resilient hero.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5115-0895-7
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2016
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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