A competent but only moderately suspenseful thriller.
In a sequel to While Justice Sleeps (2021), Abrams gives Supreme Court law clerk–turned– reluctant sleuth Avery Keene another deadly conspiracy to unravel.
Last time out, Keene, a Black woman in her late 20s who worked for loose cannon Justice Howard Wynn, who’s White, used damaging information he had gathered before falling into a coma to help force the semi-Trump-ish President Brandon Stokes (a reviled authoritarian wannabe but one with a deep intellect) at least temporarily out of office, as his Cabinet used the 25th Amendment to sideline him. Now, on the eve of Stokes’ impeachment trial, Keene stumbles on what turns out to be a revenge plot to crash the nation's power grid. Before being shot to death for his efforts, a young law clerk desperately passes her privileged information about factors leading to the suicide of his boss, a federal judge in Idaho. The judge’s death has great significance because she was one of the members of the powerful United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose duties include monitoring national security. Several of its 11 judges had connections to energy companies and exhibited “nonconforming judicial behaviors.” A persona non grata in Washington “who’d roiled a presidency,” Keene finds the going tough, not to mention dangerous. The plot features murderous government officials and an ex-Mossad assassin known as Nyx. While carefully and sometimes cleverly plotted, the novel never really gains momentum. Abrams fails to make the grid conspiracy very threatening, and the story is slowed by awkward writing: “Rage. Grief. Betrayal. Vengeance. Any of these had been known to drive good people to extremes, yet the combination of this tragic quartet manifested in a plot that boggled the mind.” And how jaded have we become that an impeachment is mere background noise?
A competent but only moderately suspenseful thriller.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780385548328
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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