It's a bit hard to believe the hero is as sane and centered as he is following his gruesome ordeal. But while not on a par...
Set in a Siberian labor camp, this atmospheric (read: brrrr!) thriller finds Nicholas II's one-time special investigator on an undercover assignment from Stalin to solve a cold-case murder—and find the long-dead tsar's hidden supply of gold.
Inspector Pekkala is more than a little familiar with Siberia. Banished there after the fall of the Romanovs, he spent nine brutal years in a forest marking trees, a job no man had previously survived for more than six months. Now it's 1939. The world order is crumbling. Russia's treaty with Germany is shaky. America is poised to enter the war. Stalin needs that gold, and now. In Shadow Pass (2011), the previous entry in this series, Pekkala investigated leaks in Stalin's secret tank-building program. Now, the former Finnish soldier must not only uncover the mysteries behind the murder—the victim was falsely identified as the imperial officer in charge of transporting the gold—he must also unravel the secret plot that put his own life at risk. Returning to the gulag, where barrels of formaldehyde await fresh cadavers for medical research, he faces an immediate scary threat from the surviving members of the fight-till-they-die Comitati band. The nomadic Ostyak tribe, which butchers hopeless "escaped" convicts who aren't killed by the cold, lurks on the outskirts of the prison. Fortunately, Pekkala has a few people watching his back. He'll need them in a saga involving trained assassins, harsh betrayals and sudden reversals.
It's a bit hard to believe the hero is as sane and centered as he is following his gruesome ordeal. But while not on a par with Martin Cruz Smith's Renko novels, Eastland's third Inspector Pekkala entry is a model of narrative control and intricate plotting.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-52573-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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