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. An obvious conflict remains unresolved for much of the way, setting up the next chapter in the saga.Ī tepid follow-up to The Camel Club (2005), with few surprises.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. The merged stories reach a predictable conclusion. Seagraves and the Camel Club are engaged in a cat-and-mouse game, and Annabelle Conroy is the special guest star. Annabelle arrives in D.C., thanks to an awkward development, along with a new piece of unfinished business. There’s little drama Players act out their part marks fall. After a series of capers out west to build their bankroll, the team heads back east. She’s assembling her team, eager to settle an old score by taking down Atlantic City’s most notorious and ruthless casino owner. Things are slightly more exciting in Conroy’s world. In the other, the Camel Club investigates the mysterious death of a close friend.

In one, Conroy and her team work their way up to their major score. The mysterious death of a rare-books expert at the Library of Congress launches the story, which splits off at first into two different plotlines.

Seagraves is killing high-level government officials, and Conroy is putting together the con of the century, with Bagger as the target. Helped by a beautiful grifter, the “Camel Club”-the four-man band of conspiracy theorists-returns to battle a threat to national security.Īnnabelle Conroy is con-artist extraordinaire Jerry Bagger, mobster and mark and Roger Seagraves, master assassin.

David baldacci the collectors review