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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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