In worldly-wise passages echoing le Carré and Graham Greene, !!! now threatens to bushwhack critics in The Prometheus...
You see him in a trenchcoat on TV credit-card ads, going about on the Orient Express, searching for a stolen piezoelectric oscillator on whose return the fate of the Free World hangs. A paranoid veiled as an international thriller writer, he sports a ten-gigabyte Toshiba laptop, but hides a dismantled Heckler and Koch MP-10 submachine gun under his coat and straps a hooked and serrated Verenski blade from Bulgaria to his shin. His high-security HQ is a bulletproof glass house in Florida from which he goes forth by darkness, bearded and speaking 17 languages with amazing fluency. He often writes in a dread digital code of double !! and triple !!! exclams, although a new female collaborator has led him into a more fearfully insecure binary code disguised as the English language (ex.: "The driving rain was unrelenting, whipped into a frenzy by howling winds, and the waves surged and crashed against the coast, a maelstrom in the black night"). He was last seen at 3:22 A.M. off a rain-beaten coast near Carthage, Tunisia, zooming away from a battered and decrepit 5,000-ton Russian-built break-bulk freighter, in a rigid-hulled inflatable black night-crawler with powerful outboard motors.
!!!'s latest fact-bulging chest of spycraft finds him struggling in a straitjacket of reasonable prose - reasonable if measured against the paranoia bursting from his dazzlingly senseless, pell-mell intrigue and the faceless but gasping and strangling characters of his shamelessly dumb The Bourne Identity (1980), or the tiring murk and bounds of human untruths of The Parsifal Mosaic (1982), to speak well of these two works. His last ultimatum, this year's The Hades Factor (p. 501), found collaborator Gayle Lynds keeping iron control on !!!'s urge to italicize and hurl plastique everywhichway in his rage to plot.
In worldly-wise passages echoing le Carré and Graham Greene, !!! now threatens to bushwhack critics in The Prometheus Deception (St. Martin's; $27.95; Oct. 31; 384 pp.; 0-312-25346-X). Burnt-out Nick Bryson, top agent of the Directorate, a shrouded, extralegal, evil US security agency, is put out to pasture. His wife, a fellow spook at the agency, has left him and vanished. But after five peaceful years teaching at a Pennsylvania college, his past explodes and he's on the run. As is !!!, now varying high-tech violence with Big Thoughts. What is Prometheus? An all-seeing group of masters of surveillance intent on bettering the world - and smashing devils like the Directorate. Its final planetary paranoia seeks a biosphere of universal eavesdropping via chip implants - and !!!'s lust for stature gives birth to his best thriller yet!!!Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25346-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
