by Christoffer Carlsson ; translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 27, 2024
A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.
The murder of a young woman in rural Sweden has wrenching, far-reaching consequences for the policeman investigating the crime and the nephew of the man convicted of it.
Seven-year-old Isak Nyqvist has a warm relationship with his mother’s 25-year-old brother, Edvard Christensson, his regular Sunday companion. But for residents of tiny Marbäck, Edvard is a bad sort who’s cut from the same cloth as his father, “a troublemaking bastard who no one liked.” So no one except the devastated Isak is all that surprised when Edvard is arrested for killing his girlfriend, Lovisa, who died of blunt force trauma to the head before her body was left in a raging house fire. Nor are locals surprised when Isak, cursed by the same bloodlines, becomes a social misfit himself by his teens. The one person who remains unsure of Edvard’s guilt is police detective Vidar Jörgensson, who’s unable to let go of the case even after his decades-long obsession with it leads to his getting pushed off the force and his once-loving marriage runs into trouble. (Vidar’s fraught relationship with his own father, a corrupt cop, was the basis for Carlsson’s great Blaze Me a Sun, from 2023.) In the end, the smallest, most slowly emerging details provide answers to the mystery. Boasting the psychological intensity of a Hitchcock film and gloomy atmospheric elements including a ferocious storm, this is a gripping, utterly distinctive mystery by a newly established Swedish master. As in Blaze Me a Sun, Carlsson explores the nature of grief and generational trauma, all while keeping readers unsure of what’s going to happen next.
A brilliantly woven, unsettling crime novel.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593449387
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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by Christoffer Carlsson ; translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles
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PERSPECTIVES
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Jeneva Rose ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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