Thriller aficionados will enjoy this one.
The middle entry in a trilogy of thrillers set in Spain, following Red Queen (2023).
In Madrid, Antonia Scott and her partner, Jon Gutiérrez, are key players in the EU's Red Queen project, designed to root out the very worst criminals. They pull a decomposed body from the banks of the Manzanares river. Then white-slave trafficker Yuri Voronin is murdered by the Russian mafia, and his pregnant wife, Lola Moreno, goes on the run. The chapters focusing on Lola's viewpoint tend to begin with a once-upon-a-time quality: “There was once a little girl who grew up in a sad, loveless home where the food tasted of ashes and the future was black.” It had taken marriage to a Russian mobster to find wealth and happiness—until death did them part, anyway. Aslan Orlov, aka the Beast, wants to find and kill Lola, so he calls in "Chernaya Volchista," the Black Wolf. (Hmm. Seems like if Spain wants big-league sleaze, they have to import it.) Scott and Gutiérrez want her, too, because “everything centers on finding Lola Moreno.” The bad guys are suitably frightening, and Scott and Gutiérrez are sympathetic protagonists. He's smart, strong, brave, and gay. She's the most intelligent person on the planet, and one of the quirkier protagonists in crime fiction. She’s afraid of almost nothing, hates to be touched, and relaxes for three minutes a day by imagining how she could kill herself. As with Red Queen, the action is intense, with blood flowing and dead bodies galore: Police find eight dead women who’d been locked in a shipping container—perhaps they once had been beautiful, but you couldn’t tell anymore. Just when it looks like all is done and dusted, something happens that screams for a sequel. One of several great lines: “a two-seater couch so close to the TV you could change channels with your eyelashes.”
Thriller aficionados will enjoy this one.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781250853691
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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