Awfully fast and agreeably scary.
A throat slasher and a U.S. Marshall duel for possession of a woman who knows much too much about the government’s witness protection program.
Paolo, the merciless throat slasher and self-mutilator in this latest from tension master Pearson (The Body of David Hayes, 2004, etc.), is in the employ of the super-evil Romero gang, very bad guys who have somehow come to control the government programmer who encrypted every bit of information about every last federally protected witness. Among the thousands of witnesses now threatened with exposure is Hope Stevens, the woman with the goods on the Romeros and the great vanished love of U.S. Marshall Roland Larson’s life. The door that slammed shut five years ago on any future for the two when Hope entered the witness protection program without him is now ajar, and Larson is dead keen to find her, save her and take up where they left off. But there’s a complication. Larson learns that Hope, who left the protection program to vanish even deeper into the heartland, now has someone else in her life. Following the slightest of clues, Paolo and Larson chase Hope from city to city, just missing her and each other, until Paolo is clever enough to snatch the plucky five-year-old daughter Hope has hidden from the world. When Larson at last finds Hope, she’s frantic with fear for the child, and Larson has his hands full keeping her safe and out of the hunt for Paolo, the missing programmer, and the Romero gang who are getting ready to auction off their wealth of information to their revenge-crazed underworld associates. Newly exposed witnesses begin to drop as the Romeros demonstrate the goods. Cell phone and e-mail trails lead the couple from Florida all the way to Pearson’s favorite Pacific Northwest, where Paolo, now maimed by oven cleaner but still holding Penny, is headed to the auction, still under orders to murder Hope Stevens.
Awfully fast and agreeably scary.Pub Date: April 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7868-6726-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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