A fast-paced thriller that rings true to the real story behind the political posturing over the drug war, illegal...
In his fiction debut, Rotella (Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the Mexican Border, 1998) draws a crime novel from the chaotic cauldron of the U.S.-Mexican border.
Valentine Pescatore, “boiling with youth and nerves and aggression,” left a Chicago hotel security job under a cloud. His uncle, a Chicago police lieutenant, called in a favor, and Valentine entered the Border Patrol Academy. The story begins with Valentine assigned as a probationary agent on “The Line,” the U.S.-Mexican border at San Diego. But he’s also in trouble, caught up in the capers of his supervising officer, Garrison, a former Special Forces soldier. Garrison’s shenanigans catch the attention of Isabel Puente, an Inspector General investigator. She turns Pescatore into an undercover agent. Garrison gets wind of his impending arrest and forces Pescatore to flee with him to Tijuana. Garrison is killed during the crossing, and Pescatore, because of his association with the rogue agent, is adopted into the Mexican narco-guerrilla family controlling the border city. Rotella, a former international correspondent and Pulitzer finalist, knows the territory. His characterizations of the players, bad and good, are solid. There’s Junior Ruiz Caballero, the local boss for his corrupt uncle, a prominent Mexico City politician; Buffalo, a stateside gangbanger, an incoherent blend of loyalty and barbarity, self-discipline and mercilessness; good guys like Leobardo Méndez, a former political activist and reporter, head of the Diogenes Group, a task force appointed by the Mexican national government to root out corruption in the federal, state and local police. Pescatore deals with the Mexican mafioso, and Méndez and Puente deal with back-stabbing and corrupt political interests as the action shifts from San Diego to Tijuana and then to the “Triple Border,” where Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil come together, a Wild West–like milieu replete with Arab terrorists, assorted drug runners, Asian immigrant smugglers and other bad actors.
A fast-paced thriller that rings true to the real story behind the political posturing over the drug war, illegal immigration and border security.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-10530-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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
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