![]() 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. If Lardo doesn't win any new friends for the franchise, he won't disappoint old hands either.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. Despite his trademark industrial-strength blather, in fact, Archy ends up acting suspiciously intelligent as a detective. Most readers will be well ahead of Archy in seeing around the curves in this case, but Lardo does provide a few agreeable surprises courtesy of a subsidiary plot, John Fairhurst III's blackmail by a scoundrel who's threatening to tell the world that John I didn't go down with the Titanic but escaped in a dress. ![]() So how does the newcomer, duly sanctified by the Sanders estate, measure up to his erratic master? Fans of the series will be relieved to know that Archy, whose ejection years ago from Yale Law restricted him to an investigative role in McNally and Son, Discreet Inquiries, is as well-turned-out, as quaintly good-natured, and as impenetrably innocent as ever as he goes about the task of shielding moneyed Melva Manning Williams and her eligible daughter Veronica from unwelcome publicity (while enlisting his pal Lolly Spindrift, Palm Beach's premier gossip columnist, to generate plenty of the favorable kind) after Melva admits that she shot her gold-digging husband Geoffrey Williams when she caught him in flagrante with a fleeing lovely who Lolly and Co. You'd have to be a sharper-eyed sleuth than foppish Archy McNally to find Vincent Lardo's name in tiny print on the copyright page, but Lardo, not the late Sanders, is the author of Archy's eighth adventure ( McNally's Trial, 1995, etc.).
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