Brackmann strikes exactly the right mood in this frantic look at an ordinary woman who can’t seem to claw her way out of the...
Brackmann (Rock Paper Tiger, 2010) returns with a thriller set in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta.
Michelle, who has lost both her husband and her financial foothold, meets a handsome stranger, Daniel, while she’s on vacation in Puerto Vallarta. But when that stranger turns out not to be the man he seems to be, Michelle finds herself stuck in a terrible state of déjà vu: Her late husband, Tom, left her deep in debt and wondering how she could have been married to a man who could sustain so many lies. After two men break into Michelle’s hotel room and beat Daniel, sending him to the hospital, Michelle discovers their phones have been switched. She tracks Daniel after finding his friends at their local hangout and stumbles into a frightening situation that Daniel attributes to his friend Gary’s odd sense of humor. When Michelle attempts to leave Mexico behind and return to California and what remains of her life, she finds herself in a Mexican jail on a trumped-up charge of drug possession. Soon, Michelle finds that few in the expatriate community of Puerto Vallarta are really who or what they have pretended to be, and her world has now been diminished to a single objective: Get out of Mexico alive. Brackmann paints Michelle as a woman who has spent most of her life taking Pilates classes and decorating her upper middleclass home only to find that her husband was a complete fake. Unable to see much of a future for herself, she’s suddenly thrust into a world where brutal drug dealers rule and fear is her everyday companion. Caught between two men and unsure which one is the bad guy and which one is the good guy, or even if there is a good guy, the author offers a darkly plausible plot that might make readers think twice about making casual acquaintances on holidays.
Brackmann strikes exactly the right mood in this frantic look at an ordinary woman who can’t seem to claw her way out of the mess in which she’s managed to land.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61695-071-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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