Solid details flesh out a nicely complicated plot.
When an ER doctor’s former fiancée is murdered, the blood evidence implicates either him or his long-missing, drug-addict identical twin.
Ben Dafoe knows crime scenes. A consultant for the Seattle police, he has befriended the cops he has helped. But his life has a darker side: Both his former fiancée, the beautiful Emily, and his twin, Aaron, lost their lives to cocaine and meth. Aaron’s body was never found, but the copious blood soaking a torched car has led the police to believe he was the victim of a drug-related homicide. Emily’s murder, a vicious stabbing death alongside that of a known dealer, seems to imply another drug killing. While Ben is saddened, he’s not completely surprised: Emily had claimed to be clean, but had a history of relapsing. However, when a midnight telephone caller whispers to Ben that his blood will be found at the scene, the picture becomes more complicated. Only his dead twin would have his exact DNA. So is Ben being framed? Or could his missing brother be alive? Because Ben knows how investigations proceed, it almost seems reasonable that he lights out to Vancouver to track down the source of the mysterious calls, the killer and possibly the brother he had thought long gone. With his background as an emergency-room physician, Kalla (Rage Therapy, 2006, etc.) gets the details right. The addled sleeplessness endemic to ER staff, the adrenaline rush of saving—or losing—a life and the split-second decisions that become commonplace all play into his hero’s questionable acts. Add in several romantic complications, tying together Emily’s past and the straying husband of Ben’s sexy colleague, Alex, and Kalla has the ingredients for a heated thriller. Flashbacks to Ben’s final encounter with Emily provide more clues, and despite the limitations of the occasionally clunky first-person narration, this thriller bounces along at a good pace.
Solid details flesh out a nicely complicated plot.Pub Date: June 12, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31832-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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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