More delightful, sun-dappled Kentucky noir.
The fourth in Offutt’s Mick Hardin series is another quick-paced, quick-witted, twisty winner.
The draftee lawman is of course former Army investigator Mick Hardin, his hopes for rural Kentucky retirement thwarted again: He’s pressed into service while his sister, the sheriff, recovers from a gunshot wound. His first call (gloriously) is a domestic incident that takes him to a backyard yurt where he tries a tarot-reader’s kombucha and dispenses justice with a side of horse sense. Then a bar owner whose tavern sits astride the boundary between the town of Rocksalt and county jurisdiction is murdered, shot three times. It seems that Mick has dodged this one: The corpse sprawls in the parking lot, which lies inside the town line, and he works for the county. But he’s drawn in when his ex-wife, irresistible still despite everything, asks him to intervene; the accused, who argued with the bar owner hours earlier, is the man she left Mick for—and now father to her two kids. Alongside the quickly proliferating complications of that case and a second double killing that seems related, Offutt intersperses chapters catching up with ex-deputy Johnny Boy Tolliver, whom Mick has sent into secret exile on Corsica to recover from the trauma that ended the previous book, Code of the Hills (2023). With aid from a mysterious and dangerous ally of Mick’s, the unworldly Kentucky-boy expat adjusts to life in foreign climes—and finds that Corsica and the Appalachian hills have more in common than he’d have guessed. The book’s final quarter has too much violent, standard mayhem, but for the most part this novel is another propulsive delight, with indelible characters, crisp dialogue, and Offutt’s usual masterful command of his setting and of the folkways and thinking of the people who live there.
More delightful, sun-dappled Kentucky noir.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780802164032
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.
Evildoers plan attacks from America to India, and Jack Ryan Jr. is a prime target.
In Washington state, a man and his family are murdered, and President Jack Ryan learns it is another Poseidon Spear incident. Three retired members of that counterterrorism group have been killed now, and the U.S. government suspects a mole in its midst. Meanwhile, the Umayyad Revolutionary Council believes it has a holy and wholly anti-American mission. Against this backdrop, Jack Ryan Jr., and his fiancée, Lisanne Robertson, visit Delhi, India, to attend the wedding of Srini Rai, the brilliant surgeon who attached Lisanne’s prosthetic left arm. Lisanne had lost her arm in Tom Clancy Shadow of the Dragon (2020). Jack and Lisanne are both operators working for the Campus, a covert group that executes secret presidential directives. A wedding is a happy occasion, and the engaged American couple intend the trip as a vacation. Jack and Lisanne will attend a sangeet, an elaborate pre-wedding party. But it isn’t long before they survive a suicide bomb attack. As with all Clancy novels, there’s plenty of action on a global scale. In simultaneous strikes, terrorists plan to contaminate America’s Western water supply with radioactive waste from Washington’s Hanford nuclear power plant, blow up a spectacular new bridge in Kashmir, and kill the evil Ryan—or Junior, at least. It will be At-Takwir, the end of days. There is an appealing mix of Indian culture, high-speed action, and the rich lode of details that characterizes the whole series. And in the background lingers the question on several characters’ minds: Have Jack and Lisanne set their own wedding date?
A fun read. Terrorists make great Clancy fodder.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780593718032
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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