With his no-nonsense style and shrewd sense of variety and pacing, Forsyth remains a superior (if unoriginal and...
Another Forsyth countdown thriller--this time in 1987 Britain, where (in the novel's last 150 pages) the men of MI5 will be madly scrambling in order to prevent a USSR-engineered nuclear "accident."
Before the countdown begins, however, Forsyth teasingly moves back and forth between two slowly-developing plots, which will link up only in the novel's final moments. Plot #1: British Intelligence accidentally learns (thanks to the patriotism of a top jewel-thief) that there's a leak high up in the Defense Ministry; John Preston of MI5 eventually traces this leak to right-winger George Berenson, who thinks he's been slipping secrets to South Africa...but has really been slipping them to a Soviet mole within South Africa's diplomatic corps! (Preston's sleuthing takes him to South Africa, and back into WW II archives.) More central, however, is Plot #2: in Moscow aged Kim Philby (a nice cameo) is helping the USSR General Secretary to formulate ""Plan Aurora""--whereby a nuclear accident in England will swing the upcoming general election over to the Labour Party (which now belongs to the "Hard Left"), ushering in a Marxist-Leninist "British Revolution," not to mention the end of NATO. And Plan Aurora involves the infiltration of a dozen or so Soviet (non-KGB) agents into England, each one carrying some ingredient for Moscow's violation of the "Fourth Protocol." (One of the secret clauses in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, this Protocol bans the hostile use of miniature, smuggled-in nuclear weapons.) Preston of MI5 begins to suspect what Moscow is up to when one of the Soviet couriers is accidentally apprehended in Scotland, carrying "a disk of pure polonium"--which, when placed next to a disk of lithium, becomes a nuclear-bomb "initiator." A search for other Soviet infiltrators begins, eventually focusing (with SAS support) on the key bomb-man, an English-speaking mole. But, though Preston & Co. are super-efficient, successfully closing in on the villains before the explosion, it's eventually revealed that the English were being aided all along by certain forces within Russia--a development which links up (too predictably, too late) with that other, Defense Ministry-leak subplot. This not-quite-satisfactory interplay between the plot-pieces is only one weakness of Forsyth's new thriller: the characters are all rather flat; the countdown lacks Jackal-level tension; the political material (Labour Party background, etc.) is ladled on with a heavy hand. No matter.
With his no-nonsense style and shrewd sense of variety and pacing, Forsyth remains a superior (if unoriginal and unmesmerizing) entertainer--and this lesser effort is sure to grab the same no-frills readership (not a speck of romance or sex here) that has made him a top-seller again and again.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 1984
ISBN: 9780553251135
Page Count: 435
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1984
IN THE NEWS
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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