A searing, curious look at ritualistic homicides boosts this striking thriller.
In this mystery, a researcher and a police deputy have inexplicable ties to a serial killer in New York state.
Sage Stevenson had been a cutter when she was a teen. But she hasn’t harmed herself in over a decade and is now busy with her postdoctoral research in paleography. That’s why she can’t explain the scars on her skin—brand new ones she’s never seen before. In Sage’s city, Savanaugh, New York, Deputy Marquis Marchant is just one of the cops at a brutal murder scene. The killer had severed the victim’s limbs, sewn them together, and carved unknown symbols into the skin (“Some of the markings—especially in the middle of the man’s back—looked like crude video game icons. Space Invaders or something like that”). Marq wants to investigate but finds himself sidelined courtesy of his right arm’s bizarre numbness, rendering the limb virtually useless. After the killer strikes again, Sage calls the police; she reputedly has had a vision of the murderer and is certain the “unique markings” on the victim’s skin are identical to hers. Only Marq, it seems, believes her, and the two soon learn they have a shocking connection to the killer as well as to a mysterious woman named Artemesia Burton. In this grim and engrossing tale, Mallery centers on three laudable characters—Sage, Marq, and the killer. Sage fears that she’s schizophrenic, while Marq’s co-workers deride him for his book smarts. The murderer, too, proves surprisingly engaging; he’s frighteningly meticulous but vulnerable, as when a not-so-simple body dump shows how easily he could get caught. Notwithstanding severed limbs, a meat cleaver, and blood galore, the novel somewhat mitigates the violence with a taut narrative that deftly highlights both the cast’s external and internal pain. A relatively early flashback pulls readers into the killer’s past, a darkly intriguing turn that, while quite revealing, stirs up further questions. The story’s latter half, in particular, hints at supernatural elements, but the author coats them in ambiguity until the sensational denouement.
A searing, curious look at ritualistic homicides boosts this striking thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2022
ISBN: 9781735338644
Page Count: 316
Publisher: TESSELESSET BOOKS
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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