A fervent hero headlines this engrossing end-of-days zombie tale.
A young woman braves a post-apocalyptic world teeming with undead hordes and hostile survivors in this horror sequel.
Following the events of An End (2022), Vallerie Sabell is a 19-year-old survivor in a zombie-littered United States. She has luckily run across some affable sorts, namely Grahm and his small group, who allow her to join their peaceful commune up in the mountains. Grahm calls the settlement “quaint”: “Tiny houses, all wood and brick; like the olden days.” Vallerie is an enemy of the Bastion, a militant band who have taken it upon themselves to police this “New America.” The book follows Bastion leader Esther Mathews as he searches for Vallerie in order to mete out the group’s typical punishment—execution. Grahm is determined to keep her safe, though the commune can’t avoid the Bastion, which willingly trades food for such goods as clothing. But when Esther realizes that Vallerie is closer than he previously believed, he’ll do whatever he can to capture her, even if it entails threatening children. Vallerie, who over time has become skilled in weapons and fisticuffs, may decide to fight the Bastion and settle their differences once and for all. Pawlicki’s second installment, like the preceding book, is a quietly enthralling tale. For example, the story centers on the living characters, from Grahm finding another band of survivors to a Bastion soldier questioning Esther’s obsession with Vallerie. Zombies, meanwhile, fade into the background, though a few people use them to their deadly advantage. There’s nevertheless undeniable evolution, with Vallerie becoming more than capable of taking down foes, undead or otherwise. Readers see various sides of her; she’s a doting dog parent to Bullet, but she won’t hesitate to kill to protect herself and her friends. Her intermittent bursts of violence produce the novel’s most indelible scenes, including the final pages, which offer some resolution—though a third volume seems likely.
A fervent hero headlines this engrossing end-of-days zombie tale.Pub Date: April 23, 2022
ISBN: 9798986050614
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
