A sensitively intelligent dramatization of the abuse of power.
A mother desperately tries to protect her teenage son from a powerful ring of pedophiles.
Suzanne Ricci discovers her next-door neighbor, Reggie Roman, dead in his home, brutally beaten. The same day, her 14-year-old son, Danny, is arrested for driving Reggie’s Mercedes with his friend Reno, well-known to law enforcement as a prostitute. The police briefly suspect Danny, who happened to spend the evening at Reggie’s home, only to find him dead on his way out the next morning. Defending himself against suspicions of murder, Danny discloses a clandestine life that shocks his unwitting mother. The boy abandons his friends, drops out of art classes, and seems numbed to the world. As a troubled youth coming to grips with his gay identity, Danny befriends Reggie, notorious for the sex-and-drug-besotted parties he hosts in his home, often for influential men. Now caught up in this sordid world, depicted chillingly by Da Vigo (Thread of Gold, 2017), Danny struggles to extricate himself from it. And after his best friend, Grace Stannard, is raped and murdered by a group of pederasts known as The Club, Suzanne becomes committed to bringing them to justice. The group is formidable, however, made up of men with high-ranking positions at the police department, the district attorney’s office, and in the media. But because she fears for her son’s life, she’s left with no choice. The author masterfully builds an atmosphere of darkness and dread. Both Danny and Suzanne are mesmerizingly layered characters. Suzanne is wounded after the sudden death of an unfaithful husband, and Danny’s traumatic encounters with The Club are all the more affecting juxtaposed with the inchoate fragility of his sexual identity. At various points, the novel’s gruesome content is hard to digest, especially those scenes that describe the abuse of children; however, Da Vigo’s treatment of that content is dramatically vivid without a hint of sensationalized license. This is a beautifully crafted and thrilling novel, unflinchingly realistic without sacrificing hope.
A sensitively intelligent dramatization of the abuse of power.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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