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LAST CALL FOR BLACKFORD OAKES
A muted ending to a less-than-thrilling spy’s career.
In his glasnost-era curtain call, Blackford Oakes comes off not so much world-weary as simply weary.
The opening of this 11th outing finds Oakes (A Very Private Plot) in the Oval Office circa 1987, asking President Reagan to give him the okay to go snooping around Moscow. Oakes thinks there might be an attempt on Gorbachev’s life, something the U.S. wants to scupper in the interest of keeping a moderate in the Kremlin. Once he’s on the other side of the Iron Curtain, it’s a pretty sedate affair, with Oakes getting a lot of his intel from Gus Windels, the Ukrainian-born CIA operative who poses as his son when they travel together, and sparking up a romance with the brainy and much younger Russian doctor Ursina Chadinov. The plot on Gorbachev doesn’t amount to much, which leaves plenty of time for Oakes and Chadinov to verbally spar over dinner and for Buckley to lob some muted jabs at misplaced Cold War–era Western liberal sympathies for the Soviet regime. Things pick up a bit when legendary Soviet double agent Kim Philby (one of several real-life people who pop up now and again) enters the picture and smells something fishy about Oakes’s cover story, setting up the inevitable showdown. Buckley clearly wants to be considered in the ranks of great literary spymasters; if he didn’t, he wouldn’t invoke Our Man in Havana so incessantly, even including an incredible scene where Reagan rhapsodizes about the book we’re reading. But the comparison with Greene essentially ends at their shared Catholicism. While it’s refreshing to read spy fiction that doesn’t feel the need to end every chapter with a sniper’s bullet or a car bomb, the author’s failure to plumb much emotional or psychological depth leaves a great void.
A muted ending to a less-than-thrilling spy’s career.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101085-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
DEVOLUTION
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
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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES
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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