Another full-throttle installment that shows that this crime series has no intention of slowing down.
In King’s (The Murder Run, 2019) seventh Travelers novel, married con artists help rob an island casino.
The two main characters adopt different names in every town they visit. Here, in Madisonville, he’s Paul Longmont and she’s Jessie Taggert. Jessie has spent the last two months “worming her way” into wealthy Hugo Lansing’s life. Paul, meanwhile, poses as someone in need of $500,000 in bearer bonds, which Lansing can provide—for a $100,000 fee. After the wily couple swipes the bonds and sells them back to Lansing for 10 cents on the dollar, Alexander Koenig, the man who got Paul into the con game, contacts them. He asks the pair to join a crew that’s going to hit the Solomon Island casino, off the coast of Bathsheba City. The plan, as Koenig tells it, is to rob the room safes as a distraction while going for a larger prize: more than $1 million of mobster Jeffrey Smithson’s laundered cash. Two noteworthy pieces of information: There are no guns allowed on the island, and the date of the planned heist is Smithson’s 70th birthday, so he’ll be surrounded by immediate family. While posing as casino workers Max and Kelly Jo Barlow, can the Travelers outmaneuver other greedy cons and learn the suspicious Koenig’s real mission? King dials back his protagonists’ personal drama, which will offer new readers a clean introduction to the series. As always, the initial con is just complex enough to maintain interest, with repercussions that may or may not bleed into the rest of the story. King resists the temptation to delve too far into Koenig’s backstory, although he establishes that Paul has “always dreamed of beating him at his own game.” JB and Lulu, another con artist couple, capably play tit for tat with the Travelers, showing the canny author at the height of his game. There’s some good gallows humor, as well, as when Max asks Kelly Jo if they should pose as missionaries, and she replies, “Have you heard the good news?” Although events crest early, the second half juggles a challenging number of moving parts.
Another full-throttle installment that shows that this crime series has no intention of slowing down.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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