Deeply informed by the author’s experiences as a journalist but triumphantly transmuted into intelligent and heartfelt...
Taking the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris as her first novel’s starting point, veteran foreign correspondent Steavenson (Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution, 2015, etc.) plunges her characters into the complexities of the post–9/11 world.
Like her creator, Kit is a Western journalist who has covered international messes from Baghdad and Beirut to a Greek port overwhelmed by refugees. She marries and then divorces Ahmed, an Iraqi who leaves her with his son from a previous marriage. She also acquires an ambivalent relationship to Islam, to which she converted despite the fact that her husband was an avowed atheist. Although Kit writes an article presenting the point of view of an Islamic fundamentalist, with whom she develops a tentative friendship, terrorist abductions of journalists and militant protests against cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad turn her into a ranting critic of Islam as the enemy of Western tolerance and diversity. It’s hard to discern what the author thinks of Kit’s attitude, since the book is written in the first person; Steavenson may be agreeing with her character or portraying her as bigoted—or a bit of both—when Kit storms, “Muslims who were born and grew up in Europe are now violently rejecting its values, while at the same time their fellow Muslims are appealing to those values to let them in.” Steavenson masterfully evokes Kit’s natural habitat: a rootless, cosmopolitan, polyglot world peopled by footloose, cynical, yet covertly committed journalists and diplomats. Among the vividly rendered secondary characters are her childhood friend Zorro, a substance-abusing photojournalist; Rousse, a painter/illustrator for Charlie Hebdo; and her “godfathers” Alexandre and Jean, friends of her journalist father whose long-ago disappearance haunts her. The coordinated attacks of November 2015 form the novel’s climax, with Kit on the scene at the Bataclan theater and her terrified adopted son frantically texting her, “Where are you?” “If you have gone to journalist [I'll] never speak to you again.” Kit’s turbulent relationship with her son, “two mongrel outcasts brought together by fate,” is one of the finest things in this very fine novel.
Deeply informed by the author’s experiences as a journalist but triumphantly transmuted into intelligent and heartfelt fiction.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-60978-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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