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. 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. 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. Still, there are enough cliffhangers here to keep a Saturday afternoon serial running for a year.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Sense of place is negligible, the armchair traveler never quite forgetting-well, the armchair. Far-fetched as all this sounds, Rollins makes it by and large credible, sketching out as he does a convincing layer of myth to explain the tree’s fantastic powers. And at the same time, in a back corner of the jungle, notorious soldier-of-fortune Louis Favre and his nasty accomplice Tshui, shrunken heads adorning her lithe, sinuous, seminude body, shadow Rand and company, setting them up for a deadly ambush at the site of a mysterious tree. Meanwhile, back at the CIA’s Langley headquarters, Kelly’s mother discovers that this same deadly element is spreading at home, threatening even Kelly’s daughter, now fallen ill. This latter aberration, a mutation of sharks with frogs, apparently stemmed from an Amazonian tribe’s use of a Jekyll-and-Hyde protein that both creates and kills other cells. In the “eat-or-be-eaten world” of the rain forest come encounters with monstrous anacondas, dark storms of locusts, and leaping piranhas. Adept at action scenes, Rollins keeps everything that follows sliding, swooping, and clawing at a steady, if ultimately wearying, pace.
They ask Nate and a team that includes an anthropologist, a shaman, and comely, auburn-haired Kelly O’Brien to find out. Now the CIA’s Environmental Center wants to learn what fate befell the crew.
Workmanlike debut hardcover, a variation on King Solomon’s Mines, this time set in the Amazon, where a search party seeks a bizarre protein that can kill and cure.įour years previously, ethno-botanist Nate Rand’s father and a team of 30 researchers disappeared while on a mission into the rain forest.
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