Rendell's favorite psycho-suspense technique—two separate plots that crisscross ironically, often fatally—resurfaces in this new, intriguing, yet very disappointing thriller: a long, low-key tease that never really rewards the reader's trust and patience. In one half of the novel, we meet 14-year-old Mungo Cameron, a likable, gawky lad who's one of the key players in an elaborate spy-game being carried on at two rival English "public" (private) schools—complete with codes, "drops," "safe houses," defectors, and double-agents. Currently, in fact, Mungo (chief of "London Central") has begun to wonder if smooth, sly, pretty Charles Mabledene, a recent defector from "Moscow Central," is perhaps a double-agent. (Is it Charles—or a mole within Mungo's elite circle—who has been leaking secret codes to Moscow Central?) Meanwhile, in the novel's other half, we meet 40-ish garden-nursery owner John Creevey, who's devastated by the desertion of his wife Jennifer: she has left him to reunite with the great love of her life—a creepy, sophisticated layabout named Peter Moran. John pleads with Jennifer to reconsider; he digs up the nasty secrets in Moran's past (arrest and conviction for molesting a young boy). But Jennifer remains intractable, begging for a quick divorce. How, then, do the two plots intersect? Well, John has stumbled onto the coded messages which Mungo leaves beneath a highway overpass for agent Charles Mabledene; fascinated, he has decoded some of the messages—and has decided that they must be part of a dangerous mob's drug-traffic schemes! So, increasingly unhinged and hoping to somehow harass (or worse) his rival, John puts a fake message in the spy-game "drop"—one that orders Charles to tail Peter Moran. And young Charles, who just happens to be the sort of pretty lad Moran dotes on, sets out to perform this mission brilliantly, determined to prove his loyalty to London Central. There's a grim, violent denouement to come, of course, but only after an attenuated buildup—and only involving supporting players. Loose ends abound, since Rendell has lumbered neurotic, repressed John with excess psycho-baggage: a loony best pal; a bonkers employee; and memories of a murdered sister (who might have been a secret nymphomaniac). Finally, then, despite fine atmosphere, dozens of clever touches, and considerable charm in the schoolboy-espionage, this is one of Rendell's least effective constructions: too much contrivance, too much clinical psychology, too little genuine passion or peril.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 1987
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1987
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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