A tale of white-collar crime that crackles with energy.
In this debut thriller, an American banker’s business trip to Paris finds him unwittingly entangled in an embezzler’s deadly revenge plot.
Paul Hart’s boss at Calhoun Capital in New York, James Hutchens, sends him to Paris to take a closer look at Renard Industries. CEO Claude Renard is a client at Calhoun, but as his current holdings are “minimal,” Hutchens wants him to move more money to the American company. Once in Paris, Hart initially meets Renard’s director of affairs, Clara Nouvelle, who essentially vets him on her boss’s behalf. Hart is understandably anxious. He has no strategy for gathering information on Renard Industries, and Hutchens has even implied that Hart’s career is at stake. But Hart finds solace in Clara, and he falls for the beguiling, self-assured woman in no time. The business trip takes an unexpected turn after Clara and Hart head to London for “a black-tie charity auction.” It’s an opportunity for Hart to meet associates of Renard’s, including his London banker, Igor Romanski. Hart doesn’t trust Igor, in part for his apparent smugness and aggressive mannerisms. But readers know that Igor has been embezzling money and laundering it for quite some time in London. And he has even bigger plans, including some type of revenge that includes an attack. As Igor’s scheme soon entails outright murder, Hart is in imminent danger. He also realizes that someone’s deception has put him in trouble with the Parisian authorities, and he may have to clear his name, provided he can stay alive. Though Flynn’s novel has little action or suspense, the plot moves at a steady clip. Hart is in Paris relatively quickly while his romance with Clara is almost instantaneous. The protagonist’s backstory is captivating: Dating Hutchens’ daughter, Veronica, led to his Calhoun job. Despite Veronica dumping Hart, Hutchens has continued to employ him. This makes Hart a vulnerable and sympathetic character, especially in light of Hutchens vaguely threatening his position at Calhoun. Although Hart concentrates on and periodically ogles Clara’s physical traits, she is a resourceful character whose many attributes gradually come to light, especially in the final act. The author shrewdly keeps the characters to a minimum and the story largely free of complications, like extraneous subplots. While this approach produces a clearly defined good guy and bad guy (Hart and Igor), there’s an overall wariness among other characters. More than one individual, for example, has been keeping secrets from Hart. Those secrets ultimately result in several plot twists, though at least a couple are ones readers will easily predict. Still, that doesn’t hamper the action when it finally arrives in the form of a shootout, a car chase, and more. Throughout the book, Flynn rigorously details environments, like scenes in London: “Continuing towards the Thames, they emerged from the smaller, narrow streets into an open square….Apartments were being refurbished, and dumpsters and heavy machinery were scattered about, the old brick buildings surrounding them looking in dire need of repair.”
A tale of white-collar crime that crackles with energy.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Papillon Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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