An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.
A vulnerable woman falls into the predatory clutches of a smooth-talking physician in this novel.
When Mary fatefully meets Dr. Drake Lucifer Bates, she muses: “The name ‘Drake’ makes me think of a dragon. Oh no! ‘Lucifer’ I know from my faith, and it reminds me of the fallen angel sent to hell by God. The devil? Holy cow! Goosebumps run chillingly along my spine, but I don’t know if they are good ones or bad ones.” At the time, she is a “fragile personality”—her marriage of more than 20 years to her husband, Paul, seems destined for divorce, the result of his deceitful infidelity. She is also suffering from terrible chronic pain in the aftermath of back surgery. When Mary encounters Drake at his clinic in Spain, her original impressions are contradictory—on the one hand, he is monstrously inappropriate, unabashedly flirtatious and visibly aroused by her. But she is drawn to his “spicy body,” his empathy, and charisma. She wonders if he can save her from a life of emotional disappointments: “For me, he’s the genuine dream of a man, a spellbinding phantom of my shining white saviour on a white rescue horse.” But she begins to detect the “deep darkness of his evil agenda” and his rampant dishonesty and even starts to suspect he is a sociopath. Drake turns out to be a malicious “puppet master” and not only uses Mary for sexual exploitation, but also convinces her to leave her husband, all the while bilking tens of thousands of dollars from her.
Stark’s entire novel is written in the style of a memoir, with Mary serving as both protagonist and narrator, conveying her lament with breathless melodrama assisted by an infinite arsenal of exclamation points. The author is at her best exploring the way an intelligent, even skeptical woman could be so thoroughly deceived by such a clumsy, transparent huckster. But the plot is meanderingly ill disciplined and often reads like an interminable, furious jeremiad. Mary complains for pages and pages in the most hyperventilated register about her woes, and that is essentially the crux of the tale. There is no element of suspense—Mary announces from the beginning that Drake is a con man and she is his dupe. Still, the weakest feature of Stark’s book, the first installment of a trilogy, is the writing, which seems pitched at one tone—screaming. Here, Mary is about to succumb to Drake’s incessant advances: “Shame on me! I’m a dead drunken fish on his hook! In my half-drunk condition, I’ve left my brain in the last glass of whisky. Oops! I know I must say no, but I’m only human and have desires! So, I’m about to fall right into his cunning, sexy plan to seduce me, as his gentle caresses [sic] and while he speaks sensitive words in my ears.” As a result, this is an exhausting story—the author’s prose exacts a heavy toll on readers who make it to the end of the work.
An intriguing but rambling tale about a woman and a psychopath.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-459360-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: XlibrisUK
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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