Overall, a good story with a multilayered hero. The author’s fans won’t be disappointed.
The flawed homicide detective Cooper Devereaux returns for a second outing (False Friend, 2017), this time chasing down a quirky killer in Birmingham, Alabama.
Although Lucas Paltrow, a “mysterious mechanic Good Samaritan,” saves the pregnant Deborah Holt’s life by fixing her car, a year later she’s found dead on her 21st birthday, wrapped up like a present. Devereaux and his longtime partner, Tommy Garretty, are assigned to investigate. Soon Siobhan O’Keefe turns up, killed and wrapped in the same way on her 21st birthday. Later there’s a third victim, and the unknown assailant is dubbed the Birthday Killer. It’s a curious plot that gives the impression the author is straining for something new. One suspect is Deborah's boyfriend, the sarcastically described “guitar legend Thor,” aka Oliver Casey, a “twenty-four carat scumbag.” Others include Paltrow and his co-worker Billy Flynn, who has a sealed juvie record. When Flynn’s house explodes and Devereaux wants to save him, Garretty helpfully advises, “Screw Flynn. The odds are he’s a murdering asshole.” The blistering scene that follows is well-done, as are Devereaux and Flynn by the end of it. A couple of subplots help tie the series together. The dying Chris Lambert, a former Police Academy instructor, plots to blackmail Devereaux, who had a checkered childhood and may be “the spawn of a mass murderer.” Or not. And Devereaux's former girlfriend Alexandra is conflicted about getting back together with him, because “she simply wasn’t comfortable in a relationship with the son of a mass murderer.” Meanwhile, whatever might be revealed about his troubled past, Devereaux has become a good adult. It’s hard to see how the author continues with these subplots—Just how bad was Dad? Will Alexandra ever make up her mind?—without letting them get stale.
Overall, a good story with a multilayered hero. The author’s fans won’t be disappointed.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59433-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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